Only Yesterday

[projekktor id=’23220′]

Only Yesterday is a 1991 anime film from Studio Ghibli, directed by Isao Takahata. The film, which is the only Studio Ghibli film to not be released in North America, is getting an English language re-release featuring the voices of Daisy Ridley, Dev Patel, Ashley Eckstein and Alison Fernandez.

It’s 1982, and Taeko (Daisy Ridley) is 27 years old, unmarried, and has lived her whole life in Tokyo. She decides to visit her relatives in the countryside, and as the train travels through the night, memories flood back of her younger years: the first immature stirrings of romance, the onset of puberty, and the frustrations of math and boys. At the station she is met by young farmer Toshio (Dev Patel), and the encounters with him begin to reconnect her to forgotten longings. In lyrical switches between the present and the past, Taeko contemplates the arc of her life, and wonders if she has been true to the dreams of her childhood self.

“I think the reason this is such a loved film and will continue to be so is because it doesn’t feel foreign,” explains Ridley. “It feels exactly right. Ghibli films, a lot of the time they’re fantastical and everything, but then the human stories are so human.”

Only Yesterday is rated PG.