Only Yesterday

It’s 1982, and Taeko is 27 years old, unmarried, and has lived her whole life in Tokyo. She decides to visit her family in the countryside. As the train travels through the night, memories flood back of her younger self in 5th grade, 1966: the rock-craze sparked by the Beatles in Tokyo, the first immature stirrings of romance, the onset of menstruation, the frustrations of math and boys, the desire to act and be somebody else. Even though Only Yesterday was the top-grossing box-office hit of Japan in 1991, it was never released by Disney for theatrical distribution in North America due to its focus on menstruation as a key subplot; it was only in 2016 that GKids finally distributed this rarely seen Studio Ghibli masterwork from the brilliant Isao Takahata (Grave of the Fireflies, Tale of the Princess Kaguya). Unsentimental and sparse, Only Yesterday is a deeply moving portrait of girlhood that dares to pose the haunting question: Have I been faithful to my dreams? To myself? 119 minutes.

Poster