Audient Anime: Only Yesterday

This is the fourth in my bi-monthly 2017 series watching films from the world of anime.

As determined as I was to finally watch something that had not been directed by Hiyao Miyazaki in the fourth installment in this series, I nearly backtracked on that resolve once the August viewing rolled around. At the library, I happened across a copy of the film that had eluded me in June, Howl's Moving Castle, when I instead watched another Miyazaki castle movie (Castle in the Sky). A perfect opportunity to watch it arose when my soon-to-be seven-year-old was home sick last Tuesday, and I was tasked with staying home with him. All seemed to be working out.

Until I presented him the movie. "No," he said, definitively, in a tone I translated as "enough of your bullshit, Dad."

See, I'd strong-armed him into three previous viewings in this series, and though they all had positive outcomes, it was becoming clear that he was less and less amenable to my tactics. This month, he finally put his foot down.

So I went in another direction entirely.

Not only was the film I chose the first in this series not directed by Miyazaki, it was also:

1) The first I watched entirely in Japanese, as I had no child who had to understand the words because he couldn't keep up with the subtitles;

2) The first that didn't involve magic, sprites or other woodland creatures;

3) The first that possibly didn't even need to be animated.

That was the big adjustment in Isao Takahata's Only Yesterday, an animated film that is unlike any I have seen before, as everything that happens in it could be accomplished just as easily with actors and natural settings. As another indication of what type of film it is, the BluRay cover advertises that it contains "Adult Themes." When was the last time you saw that on the box of an animated movie other than something like Heavy Metal or South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut? This movie is not "adult" because it contains sex, violence or bad words; it's "adult" because it would be boring to kids.

And boy would it have been. I knew not even to try Only Yesterday on my son, as the cover promised something far less fantastical than the Studio Ghibli films that had already been a hit with him. This is Ghibli too, but it's Takahata's special brand of Ghibli, one we saw in the far more adult-themed Grave of the Fireflies, which had been my favorite anime film of all time until My Neighbor Totoro assumed that honor earlier this year.

If I had realized before watching that Takahata was responsible for Grave of the Fireflies, I would have a) understood better what to expect, and b) been a lot more excited for Only Yesterday, which I kind of stumbled across and ended up watching when a friend endorsed it as a possible option for this series. And so I did spend the first half of Only Yesterday only slightly less bored than my kids would have been. I kept waiting for the high concept hook to present itself, for a flurry of magic and color to break out on the screen. It never happened, and I actually abandoned the viewing after 40 minutes on the first night -- not because I intended not to finish it, but because I was just too tired.

Fortunately, this story has a happy ending, as the second half enchanted me in a manner entirely different from, though similarly fulfilling to, its predecessors in this series.

It's probably time I tell you something about this movie.

It's almost disarmingly simple. The main character, Taeko, is a 27-year-old Tokyo woman who longs for a holiday in the country. She doesn't have any direct relatives she can visit, so she calls upon a somewhat strained connection, the brother of her brother-in-law, to take a week-plus in a remote farming country to help with the safflower harvest. On the train ride there, she reviews coming-of-age memories from her childhood. Once she gets there, she becomes entranced with the slower speed of life, devoting her full energies to the harvest and impressing the locals with her work ethic. She also catches the eye of a local young man, Toshio, while continuing to process memories from her youth and consider the future.

And this is really it. When I went to wikipedia to brush up on the plot after I finished, to see if I had missed anything from my sleepy first night viewing, I chuckled at how little detail it offered. The movie is small and quiet and contemplative, though of course it also includes the beautiful vistas of the Japanese countryside, and the equally beautiful vistas of the landscape of emotion and memory.

At first, as I said, I was thrown by this. It may have been the slight difficulty of watching the movie in Japanese -- I resisted the opportunity to hear Daisy Ridley and Dev Patel voice the leads in English -- but I was a bit unclear on the film's flashback structure at the start. A lot more time was spent with precocious ten-year-old Taeko at the start than her modern-day self, and I might not have always realized that they were the same character or that these were flashbacks to her life. It was also difficult for me to understand the relationship of the memories she was processing to the events she was currently facing, clouding my understanding all the more, and the film only uses a slightly muted color palette to offset the flashbacks, making it sometimes hard for me to pick out which occurred in which time period.

As it happened, my second night's viewing coincided with when she arrived in the country, at which point the film also struck a better balance between the present-day "plot" (such as it is) and the flashbacks. It was here when I, like the main character, fell in love with Japanese village life, and with the modest ambitions the film was trying to pursue.

By the end, a likely 3-star rating had risen all the way up to 4.5 stars, as the denouement -- which plays almost entirely over the closing credits -- was like the wondrous realization of all the emotional capital this film had slowly been building. Takahata also indulges here, for one of only a very few times, in the ways that animation as a medium can amplify his story.

In thinking about this film since I finished, I decided that Takahata is like the Yasujiro Ozu of anime. His apparently quiet methods are actually penetrating deeply into the human heart, and into the ways the small dynamics in our relationships with others, especially family, speak volumes. These fellow countrymen undoubtedly have an affinity for one another's world views.

All four of the animes I've watched so far have garnered at least four stars from me, with two of them hitting a full five. Will my luck continue in October? I'll do one other non-Miyazaki film in this series, and then one final Miyazaki, but which will be in October and which in December, I have not yet decided.