Only Yesterday · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The Okajima family's first pineapple arrives in the Tokyo apartment in 1966 as an event. It is an import, a luxury, something the whole household gathers around. Opened, it disappoints. Ten-year-old Taeko eats her share anyway, because it cost money and because everyone is watching.

Nothing follows from this. No lesson, no reconciliation, no seed planted for a third act. Sixteen years later, on a train heading north to Yamagata, the twenty-seven-year-old Taeko is still carrying it.

Notice how the film delivers that. It gives you 1966 without any of the equipment cinema built for the job: no dissolve, no harp, no dated title card. A phrase in the present rhymes with a phrase in the past, or a food does, or a sound, and you are simply there. Takeshi Seyama cut the picture on association rather than on incident, so the two time frames sit beside each other like two rooms in one house.

Deleuze separated two things most movies confuse. A recollection-image is the flashback proper: a piece of the past, dated and framed, fetched by a character who needs it and handed back to the plot. Sheets of past are something else. On this account the past is not filed behind you awaiting retrieval; it coexists with the present in layers, and remembering means moving into one of those layers rather than pulling a document out of it. Taeko's 1966 episodes look like flashbacks by content — a school year, a boy, a fraction problem — but the film will not let them behave like flashbacks. They aren't retrieved. They show up.

Why bother with that vocabulary? Because the plain description of this film, "a woman remembers her childhood," makes it sound like nostalgia, and it isn't nostalgia. Nostalgia puts the past safely behind you and charges a small fee to look at it. Takahata's past has standing. It makes claims. The proof is in the end credits, where the ten-year-old and her 1966 classmates physically shove the adult Taeko off a departing train and back toward Toshio. The story's resolution happens in the space reserved for names, and it is carried out by children who, on any ordinary accounting of time, no longer exist. They are not memories being consulted. They are a region of time that never stopped being in force.

Now look at what the film spends its running time on. Safflower picking, at the length safflower picking takes. A pre-dawn kitchen. Conversations in long two-shots that keep going after the line has landed. Deleuze called these stretches dead time, and he located the birth of a whole regime of cinema in the maid's morning in Umberto D. — grinding coffee, wetting the floor, closing the door with her foot — a sequence Zavattini and Bazin defended precisely because it pays no dramatic dividend. De Sica's maid is the direct ancestor of Takahata's flower rows. When a character can only look and listen, with no action available that would resolve anything, Deleuze called what she receives a pure optical and sound situation, and called her a seer rather than an agent. Taeko in the safflower is a seer in exactly that sense. So is the ten-year-old at her desk, failing at fractions in front of the class, able to do nothing but be seen failing.

There is a wrinkle that makes Takahata's version stranger than De Sica's, and it is why this film belongs to the history of the medium and not only to Ghibli. In live action, duration is nearly free. The camera runs, the maid grinds the coffee, the stock is the only cost. In cel animation every second of a woman cutting stems must be drawn, inked, painted and shot by people on salary. Dead time is the most expensive thing you can put in an animated film, because nothing in it is spectacular enough to repay the labor. Takahata bought it anyway, and Ghibli's move around this period from per-drawing piecework to full-time salaried animators is what made buying it possible. He had rehearsed the method on Heidi in 1974, where bread-making and cheese and the airing of bedding are each timed to the real rhythm of the work. Only Yesterday scales that to a feature about an adult.

The faces are the other expense. Japanese animation normally dubs dialogue onto finished picture, which is why so much anime lip-sync is a generic flap. Takahata recorded Miki Imai and Toshirō Yanagiba first and animated to their performances, so the drawings follow the real hesitation and the real muscular consequence of speech: cheekbones, nasolabial folds, a jaw that works. Viewers found it uncanny, and they were right to notice. Deleuze's late cinema has a name for films built this way, a cinema of the body, where posture and attitude carry the duration that action used to carry. Its sharpest unit is the gest, an attitude that exposes an entire social relation without anyone stating it. This film is made of them. Toshio's grandmother proposes a match, and Taeko, cornered by kindness with no rude exit available, flees. The father stays silent through a whole domestic sequence and then slaps her. The blocking of the apartment — who sits where, who reaches for what, who is not looked at — comes out of Ozu's Late Spring and Naruse's Repast, where a woman's dissatisfaction is rendered through household economy rather than confrontation.

Then look at the edges. The 1982 material is painted to the frame edge, Kazuo Oga's backgrounds dense with agricultural fact under natural light logic and muted greens. The 1966 material is high-key, washed, and unfinished at the borders: the field stops before it reaches the edge and gives out into white paper, and the child stands in a patch of nothing. Deleuze's any-space-whatever is a space that has quit being a setting for action and become pure affect, and these white margins are that, drawn rather than described. Recollection keeps the middle of a picture and loses the rim. The same license produces the one openly impossible shot in the film, where Taeko floats up into a cloud-strewn sky after a boy asks whether she likes rainy days or cloudy ones or sunny ones. She does not act. She goes still and the world takes over the motion, which is what Deleuze meant by the movement of world.

The film's real subject reaches you through the safflower. The benibana petals become the red rouge worn by women in the cities; the girls who pick them have hands scarred by the plant's thorns. One object, two ends of a supply chain, and Taeko is an urban consumer meeting the production side of her own life. Toshio's argument that this countryside is entirely man-made, the work of centuries, is visible in Oga's terraced fields and irrigation channels before he says it aloud. That is close to what Deleuze called the stratigraphic image, a landscape read as sediment with a buried past spoken over visible ground. The elder's history of safflower dye and Toshio's account of depopulation are the voices; the field is the strata. Under it Takahata lays Hungarian, Romanian and Bulgarian folk music, which illustrates nothing and refuses the sentimental furusato register that Japanese nostalgia media of the 1980s had already used up.

What did it do to filmmaking? It settled an argument about what animation is for. In 1991 the international idea of anime had been fixed by Akira: kinetic, dystopian, spectacular. Takahata put an unmarried twenty-seven-year-old clerical worker on screen for 118 minutes with no villain and no plot to speak of, and it became the top-earning Japanese release of the year, carried by adult women who anime features had not been built to serve. The everyday-life features that follow, Ocean Waves and Whisper of the Heart, come directly out of it; Whisper was directed by Yoshifumi Kondō, whose adult faces here are the reason the performance experiment holds. And the whole practice descends from the film that pulled Takahata into animation in the first place, Grimault's La Bergère et le Ramoneur, a writer-led production where authorship sits in structure and staging rather than in a lead draftsman's hand. Takahata never drew. He built.

America did not see this for twenty-five years, a delay widely blamed on the sequence about menstruation and the boys' teasing that follows it. Watch that scene, the pineapple and the fractions in sequence, and the film's proposition is plain: the humiliations handed to a ten-year-old are the material from which an adult's sense of what she is permitted to want gets made. The film never rules on whether Taeko is owed restitution for hers. It just sends the child to collect. On a rewatch, keep an eye on the edges of the 1966 frames, and on how long the film holds after a line has landed. The holding is where it thinks.