Only Yesterday (DVD) (English Subtitled) (Hong Kong Version) DVD Region 3

Okajima Taeko is an office worker who comes across as a little aloof from her co-workers. As she embarks on her holiday, Okasjima's story is intercut with memories of her childhood. These reminiscences reveal the young Okajima as far less academically inclined than her two older sisters. Okajima deals stoically with the air of disappointment that her family projects at her underachievement. This is one of the frustrations of childhood. The sense that we cannot do the right thing in our parent's eyes, yet are powerless to do anything about it.

Okajima's reminiscence is broken by her arrival at the farm. There, she embraces the hard, repetitive work of picking safflowers, flowers used for dyeing clothes that ironically, only the rich could afford, not the peasant girls who picked them.

Only Yesterday is full of these stories of life's small frustrations and disappointments and a child's seeming invulnerability: the young Okajima is the only one he remains in town while her friends go on holidays at the anticipation then the disappointment of eating a fresh not canned pineapple. These beautiful vignettes capture those almost forgotten feelings where small events take on huge significance in a child's life.

Only Yesterday marvellously captures the feeling of life in Japan both past and present. It shows us family dynamics and social rituals that are both familiar yet at the same time culturally different. There is something compelling to Okajima's joyful desire to work on a farm for holidays and her poignant childhood memories trigger one's own empathy gland. If this was all Only Yesterday did, it would be a fine film. However, it is a Studio Ghibli film and Okajima's childhood stories subtlety impact on her adult life, a life that has engendered her with unacknowledged feelings of dissatisfaction.

Only Yesterday is a deeply human film. It shows us things about ourselves and influences on our lives we have little time to acknowledge. Okajima's epiphany has far more power than Vin Diesel's whole back catalog and her change, although small, is profound in its understanding of people's need to belong and choose a life that is meaningful and productive.

If you have only been exposed to Myazaki's masterpieces, you are missing half of what Studio Ghibli is about. While Myazaki leans toward fantasy and epic, Studio Ghibli's smaller, more intimate and personal films show that there is no scale they cannot do.

10 windy days out of 10

by Andrew Symons - heroic-cinema.com