Thirty-ish Taeko is helping harvest crops with relatives in the country as a vacation, hanging out with a hottie neighbor who will obviously be a love interest. Meanwhile Taeko is reviewing her life to this point with extended flashback stories of when she was ten, the frequency of cuts between time periods gradually increasing until they blend wonderfully over the closing credits. In a few spots it’s overly slow or precious or obvious, but it also has 10-12 moments of magical beauty like that final scene.

Nice stylistic choice to make backgrounds in the memory scenes pale and faded at the edges, lacking the environmental details of the present-day. The highest grossing Japanese film of 1991, but poorly treated in the states… it wasn’t supposed to be The Menstruation Movie until Disney acted like the film’s third-graders and refused to touch it unless the icky girl stuff was removed.

Noel Murray:

Only Yesterday can sometimes seem a little too random in what it chooses to show, but it has a cumulative power as Taeko comes to understand that the past that shaped her needn’t define her. That’s a remarkably sophisticated theme for any film, let alone a cartoon. But then what else should we expect from a filmmaker so precise that he’d spend five minutes describing the exact texture and taste of a piece of fruit?