It’s powerful to consider that cinema is, at its core, the illumination of a staged memory. The projector’s light gives new life to events of the past with each screening. Film-going, then, is always a conversation with the past. In the age when film was primarily a physical medium—shot on and projected from celluloid—a moviegoer physically sat in theater as light was projected through an old film strip – past images captured months or even years before ever being displayed on the screen. Even with digital projection’s rise, moviegoers still get to sit in dark rooms as images are illuminated – be it from the memory of a film reel or digital file. The text itself – those documented moving images – is still intact. And we keep flooding theaters because the cinematic ritual is itself an act of communal time travel.
The 25-year-old Studio Ghibli produced Only Yesterday is a time travel film without a time machine. Or, more accurately, the cinematic device employed is less external than it is organic and human: memory. Alternating between flashbacks to 1966 and the film’s present of 1982, Isao Takahata’s 1991 film (just now being distributed in the U.S.) is a meditative reverie about how our present selves are always in conversation with the past. It’s a parable of transition and longing which, even 25 years later, resonates loudly in our world of uncertainty.
As Taeko sets out on her holiday to the Japanese countryside, memories of her life at 10-years-old begin to flood her journey. The film begins in 1982: Taeko is 27-years-old, has a good but unfulfilling job in the city, and is unmarried (and not-really-interested). But many of the present-day scenes serve as punctuation and framing while her travels begin to conjure her past self. The first half of the film spends most of its time in 1966, when she was 10. From 1982, she reflects in voiceover on her past. Her narration transports the audience to that time and place as we relive it with her.
Flashbacks are depicted in an airy, nebulous animated style. The edges of frames seem like mere sketches in contrast to the meticulous detail of Taeko’s present day. In one scene outside a schoolyard, the last of younger Taeko’s friends says goodbye on her way to vacation. Taeko is positioned in the middle of the frame and as the animated background surrounds her, its colors fade to white as the edges embody negative space. An electrical ground wire to the right of the frame has the verisimilitude of a yellow pencil – the artist’s hand at the edge of the memory. Taeko’s memories often feel like this – sketches either being redrawn or fading away.
Takahata’s vision of the past is a muted, unfinished palette. Colors pale. Lines trail off. Banal scenes of familial life feel extended past themselves, full of longer takes and non-sequiturs. An imbued wistfulness softens yet enlivens the design of yesteryear. While at first things feel nostalgic, smaller scenes give way to momentous occasions, like learning about mensuration, her first crush, and her struggles with school. Present-day Taeko makes sure to note that this is not mere memory-lane tripping. The past invades her present.
This invasion amplifies the transitory. As older Taeko enters the countryside for holiday, it’s obvious her malaise isn’t listless. Instead it’s full of seeking. Takahata and his animators draw the older Taeko’s face with joy. Smile lines and full cheeks amplify her love of life. She doesn’t complain. She’s not haunted by any existential dread. She just feels out of place. It’s memory’s task–the plight of her old self–to move her along.
The holiday brings new terrain. She’s always longed to be away from the city, and Taeko makes mention of this when the narrative shifts in the middle to focus more on her holiday activities, as she farms saffron and reflects on rural life with her male companion Toshio. The countryside is her pining actualized. It’s the place where new memories can take root. Where the past fades, her present bursts with detail – from the wild crops basked by sunlight to the shadowy, rainy nights teeming with mystery.
As the film plays in my own memory, I hesitate to refer to the past narrative of Only Yesterday as flashback. The memories are told as if the 10-year-old Taeko is as present and real a character as her 27-year-old self. Time is bent in this pensive reverie. The narrative pushes back and forth without easy logic. It’s meandering yet specific, like real memory. This proves a brilliant decision by Takahata. He’s not seeking to make sense of why certain memories haunt us at certain times. Memories have no logic. They function more like providential apparitions, as if they are living, breathing things from our past come to wake us from present slumber.
This is echoed in Taeko’s conclusions on these newly flooding memories: these two selves are states of transition, like chrysalises ready to sprout new wings. Transition then is transformation. The wisdom of the past can and must speak to the self of today. And maybe this is where Takahata’s time travel story is most astute: he doesn’t allow Taeko to have any shame or regret or disdain for her younger self. She sees that little girl as wise as her 27-year-old self. The truth at the heart of this film is that the past is just as real as what is or what is to come.
Films about memory are quite like films about films, in that the object of study turns from being the specific memory or film and instead becomes an embodied self-awareness. There is no other medium that can as effectively capture the feeling of navigating that strange habitation of the past more than cinema. Memory and cinema are inextricably bound to one another. We keep coming back because the very spectacle of film begs us to consider what has come before and how it might bear upon our present. Film is itself memory.
Why do we long to travel through time? Only Yesterday reveals that at the heart of this desire isn’t nostalgia or a longing for the “good ole days.” Something innate in us recognizes the wisdom of the past. History begs us to consider our lives embedded in a greater narrative. This is the draw of cinema. It’s a historied, mass text of life much like the social human consciousness. We don’t just like films, we befriend them, hide within them, find pleasure and pain in them. Cinema is memory projected, and it is at times our wiser self.