Today we watched Only Yesterday, Isao Takahata's second film after the gut-wrenching Grave of the Fireflies, and it was... okay. Neither of us had watched it before.
Taeko is a 27-year-old woman who has lived her entire life in Tokyo, but has longed for the country since she was 10, when all her friends visited their relatives during school holidays. This is her second year visiting her sister's husband's family so that she can farm for two weeks at a time (taking leave from work).
The film follows her at 27, working the fields, getting to know Toshio, the man who picked her up at the train station, and remembering different vignettes of when she was 10. These memories don't really connect to each other (one was of a boy who had a crush on her, another was of the first and only time her father slapped her, a third was about when she wasn't allowed to act in a college play, etc.), and they don't really connect to what's happening to her at 27. Taeko herself doesn't know why she's remembering these things now, which makes for a somewhat disjointed viewing experience. It was almost as if 10-year-old Taeko and 27-year-old Taeko were two completely unconnected people.
Also, what was up with some of the animation in this movie? 27-year-old Taeko looks like an old woman, and every time they panned to the various people working in the various farms, they all had these plastic-y, frozen smiles on their faces like they were all about to go on a murder spree. The animation was pretty good for the most part, but those two things were really odd decisions, especially when we saw Taeko and the farmers during most of the film.
I didn't hate Only Yesterday, but I didn't really like it, either. This is just sort of there, existing. I didn't get the same feeling of nostalgia or trying to find your place in the world that I did with Whisper of the Heart or even Ocean Waves (misplaced as that nostalgia was). Some of Taeko's memories were interesting, or funny, or shocking, but never enough to hold anything together.
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