ONLY YESTERDAY (OMOIDE POROPORO) (1991) ***1/2

Reviewed 9/27/99

Director Isao Takahata does what he does best in Only Yesterday, which is to evoke realism with animation. I didn't feel this worked as well in his most famous film, Grave of the Fireflies, because animation generally does not elicit gritty starkness as well as kaleidoscopic beauty. Whereas Grave of the Fireflies was more like Rossellini's Italian neo-realism, Only Yesterday is more like Ozu's contemplative observation. Needless to say, animation has a harder time evoking neo-realism.

Only Yesterday's story is fairly simple. Tokyo office worker Taeko reminisces about her 5^th grade year in school while journeying to the countryside on vacation. Her parents and her two much older sisters had no compassion for her youthful escapades, and little Taeko faces constant embarrassment. What makes Only Yesterday so effective is how well it captures the little details of life -- from eating a pineapple for the first time to being thoroughly confused by trying to divide fractions by fractions. In different vignettes, the young Taeko experiences a high after finding out that a star baseball player likes her and anguish when her father dashes her ambitions to become an actress. The older Taeko finds enlightenment realizing all these years later that a boy in school had a crush on her.

Takahata's gorgeous art endlessly enhances this vividness of life, especially what is done with light -- sunrises, sunsets, car headlights. In the past, I've found Takahata's animation to be flat compared to that of his business partner and fellow director Hayao Miyazaki. That is not so here.

The movie's main problem is that it occasionally dovetails too greatly into schmaltz. Also, Taeko undergoes so many humiliations in childhood that she's almost like Charlie Brown without the humor. When the film ends with a Japanese version of Bette Midler's "The Rose," I started to roll my eyes, but then the children from the past appeared, interacting with the present like ghosts, both literally and metaphorically. I think even the most hard-hearted cynic would find this sequence to be too enchanting for words.