Ani-Me #4: ONLY YESTERDAY and Your Fifth Grade Self (Patreon)

Welcome to Ani-Me! The Series Where You Make Me Watch Anime!

To be clear, you aren’t making me do anything. I’m excited for this! And after a couple of wonderful entries we continue our journey with a seminal film from Isao Takahata. Yes, that’s right…

Today’s entry: ONLY YESTERDAY (1991)

I didn’t have any good place to put the following observations, so before I get into the essay I just want to single two things out. The first is that I’m sort of aware enough of the whole “subs versus dubs” conversations with anime, but this is one of the first times I was really hit by the complications of navigating it. Thus far I’ve had a pretty easy time getting subs versions, but this time watching it involved a 17 dollar price tag, so I just watched the free dubbed version on HBO max. And I usually don’t like singling negative things out, but Daisy Ridley’s VO is… not… a great… fit. I didn’t really temper my enjoyment of the film (it’s hard to temper), but I genuinely get why people get finicky about this shit.

But the other, more important observation is that right when the credits started rolling, HBO MAX s just brings up the scrolling bar and tries to get you to watch something up and… well, if you know this movie, you know that literally the big culminating decision happens AS THE END CREDITS play. The idea that someone might miss that because they were prompted to? All because every streaming service will literally die if you watch one (1) credit. The idea that this has become the default just enrages me, honestly. They’re always like “we have metrics to show that more people keep watching if don’t give them an out while watching credits!” To which, I’m like, OH REALLY, did you know you can also break into people’s homes and tie them up in chairs Clockwork Orange style and force them to watch your service 24/7 and that will work even BETTER!!!! Is this a clear exaggeration? Yes. But the point is that there’s no point in advocating what artificially forces people to keep watching. The point is to advocate what is decent and honors a given watching experience. Especially if you’re interrupting important parts of a fucking narrative like they did with this one.

Anyway! Time to talk about how amazing this movie is.

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“I didn’t mean to take my fifth grade self on this trip, but she’s always around.”

Quite obviously, this quote hangs over the entire film. Taeko is taking a break from her modern life / big job in the city and heading on a summer holiday to the countryside. But as she begins her journey, she can’t help but think back to a very specific year in her life: 5th grade and all that went with it. The memories seep in with force, taking up so much of her brain space in ways that may only seem tangential, but bubble up anyway. It starts with the very literal comparisons with past vacations and little escapes, but runs into so many more memories of her family and school life. As those moments keep rushing in, Taeko asks herself the obvious question…

“Why fifth grade, I wonder?”

While she never really tries to answer with specificity, the film itself does the best job it can. Because Only Yesterday paints a beautiful, stunningly accurate portrait of that certain time when childhood innocence leaves and we move onto that different stage of life. It’s the arrival of puberty and all the confusion and embarrassment that comes with it. It’s the dawning of guilt and learning to feel bad about yourself (often for socially constructed reasons you never realized you should feel bad about). And it’s the time when we have to leave the singular, extreme emotions of childhood behind and live with complex, multifaceted feelings that come with added responsibility. The film dramatizes all these moments with such utter specificity, often exploring them in these little seemingly-unconnected sequences that still work like gangbusters. I’ll admit it weirdly took me a second to get use to the rhythm of what it was doing, but once I did? The joyful flow of past vignettes feel as natural as life itself.

It starts with Taeko’s simple talk about baths and lonely summers, but then finds memories in things as simple and innocent as her family getting their hands on a real life pineapple and having no idea what to do with it (the pineapple is also clearly unripe, which they do not understand). The fact that this sequence feels so evocative speaks to the power of the film’s approach and seeing things through Taeko’s child-like eyes. It gets to the notion that NOTHING about our lives is small. And these little intersections can feel FEEL so powerful because it genuinely meant something to us at the time. But it’s not just little moments and odd food stuffs, Only Yesterday is unafraid to dig into slightly deeper subjects, too.

Like schoolyard socialization! You know, all those terrible conversations of who likes who and giggling and shoving kids together to make theme interact. The horror of these things is that it’s not just your own embarrassment, it’s the fact that EVERYONE LOOKING and the intense social pressure that comes as part of it. As if you are just being a pawn in everyone else’s wicked game. But it feels all the more cruel when real emotions are at the heart of it. Take Taeko’s budding fixation on a pitching phenom from another class. Sure, she knows nothing about baseball. But it highlights that awe of someone being really good at something. And the way you look at everything they do with glittery stars in your eyes. Does this fixation lead to some powerful story about a person who became a part of Taeko’s life forever? No, the victory is a brief conversation and then elation of doing the adult thing of TALKING TO A BOY YOU LIKE ABOUT CLOUDS OR SOMETHING. Such moments are hard won and the ensuing shot of her suddenly running up into the sky is one of the best things I’ve ever seen in my life. I audibly guffawed! And when we’re young, these moments can feel like the whole world.

The film also captures the flip-side of this elation, which of course is the abject social horror of sex education and how quickly young boys weaponize knowledge of periods to engage in good old fashioned sexual harassment (Looking back and realizing not just how bad this was, but how normalized it all was sends me into an existential spiral). But the sequence in the film conveys the reality of this while pulling no punches, nor pulling away from Taeko’s feelings of being caught up in it. Which really speaks to the thing that I keep noticing as I watch more anime, which is the attention to character’s interiority. When the jerk boy tells Taeko not to touch the ball because “I could have caught your period,” (which she hasn’t even had yet and is just worried people THINK she has) her friend laughs and makes fun of the dumb boy and rightly so. But for Taeko? It’s not about him being dumb. It’s more about merely being embarrassed and her vulnerability by association. But her cool, tough friend doesn’t give in: “having period nothing to be ashamed of.” And we see the idea of defiant independence, one apart from what some dumb boy says, start to dawn on her. Because so much of this film is about the moments where we try to find control, autonomy, and power in a world where we have so little.

It’s that complicated, internal psychological space where the whole film rests. It’s the moment where young Taeko defiantly tries to eat an onion after she notices her father isn’t eating the ones she gave him. It’s also the haunting, complicated story of the enamel purse fight with her sister, which builds to a simple car trip into town and the issue of “whether or not she’s coming.” It seems so small, but we see the complication in Taeko’s young mind: the lack of power, the anger, the wanting to come, the saying no to see if she will get babied, the father simply turning and leaving her with the consequences of her decision, then the starling turn of running out with no shoes (which seems to be a huge no no, I guess?) and it all ending in her getting hit for the first by her father. Honestly, the emotional ping ponging of this scene is so damn intense.

As is the fallout, because there’s so much confusion of how her father could do this. Effectively, how could he go from the kind of man who asks, “Do I spoil you, little bear?” To the one who slaps her for not wearing shoes outside? Even now, looking back, our grown up Taeko wonders why it just happened just the one time? You can see the way she grapples still with the complexity this. Much the way she still grapples with the kind of person she should be after her mothers quibbles with lines like: “I think it would be better if you were a girl who ate what she was given instead of a girl whose essays were just a little bit better than everyone else’s.” Which OOOOOF is child’s spark-killer. But there were no deep answers to “the why” with which these things happened. There were just so many moments of her childhood where she looked for reassurance, but her parents always busy with something else.

So many of Taeko’s memories are about that gross nexus of brutality. The pain of hearing people discuss your future right in front of you. The pain of hearing a parent tell her sibling, “Taeko is not a normal kid!” The pain of hearing her mother blame her not joining the new play on HER non-existent shyness, and not the fact her father forbid it (because that would be embarrassing for HIM, you see). The film characterizes the feelings of injustice and helplessness in these moments, along the way that this guilt becomes internalized and way we make things our fault. Which all culminates in the complicated ending story about the “dirty kid” from class and the feelings of guilt she had about their final interaction, the way she thought of him, the way he really thought of her, and the way their relationships manifested. As it all spills out, you want it to start adding up…What’s the point of all these memories? Where is it all going?

Put simpler: is any of this *a story*?

In so many narratives, good flashbacks usually have to directly inform the given a scene (like the Q and A in Slumdog). Or playing with the audience’s knowledge and defying expectations (good episodes of LOST did this really well). Or maybe it’s just expertly playing with two stories in different fashion (like The Godfather Part II or something). Because quite often, bad flashbacks are sort of just textural nonsense where the storytellers think they’re allowing you to go “deeper” into a character, but really they’re just fiddling their thumbs with a lack of purpose and filling up run time. But the reason the flashbacks of Only Yesterday work so well, even though they’re light on “the hard logic of inclusion,” is because the film is not even trying to tell a story with them, nor directly inform the action. Instead, it’s telling the story of her own internal search which she is directly commenting on. As such, it’s not treating her thoughts as “information,” it’s giving her emotional arc this outrageously weight, mostly because it’s bringing those memories to life with such adept psychological nuance. In short, it gets away with so much because it’s so good at making you care about small details (which is insanely hard to do). Just like Only Yesterday can make you care deeply about the details of “rouge farming.” Because they’re so damn earnest, there’s tremendous power in these deep reflections.

And the real power is that they get me to be reflective in turn.

It’s the kind of movie where your own life seems to play right along side it. Because just like the film, we all have these white-stained memories of that age. I think about the times I stood silently by as someone was getting picked on, afraid it would happen to me, too. I think about moments of embarrassment, like getting locked in a closet with a girl I liked and everyone laughing outside. I think about the way people used to talk about IQ and say gross things like “she’s getting dumber” that we hear in the movie. And with all the farming sequences, I think about this summer job I had on a campground. They had these big ass gardens that basically added up to a little farm and I learned to grow all these different vegetables that we sold. Even then, it felt like this weird little hard won slice of heaven. Sure, you’d be toiling there day after a day, doing backbreaking labor and I’m of two-minds about that phrase that Taeko says: “I’m tired but in a deeply satisfying way.” It’s true, sometimes you do feel that way. But there’s also this existential tiredness that comes with doing it for months on end, too. Because you mostly go autopilot and get bored and you keep trying to escape into so many otherworldly thoughts. Thus, I’m under no illusions of which life is easier.

But I also think about the people I met those working summers. There was an older man who lived on the campground and had epileptic seizures and had to wear a helmet because of it. But he helped out a lot with electrician work. I was all of 16 years old, but the bosses still made it so I had to “watch him” as we worked, which I’m sure he found patronizing as all hell, but he still went along with it. He also taught me how to do wiring and plumbing and whole bunch of other stuff that’s continued to be insanely useful to this day. It’s this relationship that just sticks with me, always. Whenever I’m fixing my sink, these seemingly tangential memories of this man and the things we talked about, whether it was his former life in teaching or his injuries, all as we stood on these rolling hills and overlooked the tides of Cape Ann. It’s as vivid as any memories I have. And the reason I thought about him while watching this movie may be as simple as “because I did.”

That’s the thing about memory.

For as bad as my actual memory can be (and it’s bad), these connections are quiet and powerful and profound and often best honored with thoughtful meditation. So when I dig into Only Yesterday, the question to ask yourself is not so much “who did you want to be in 5th grade?” Because for Taeko, it wasn’t about honoring the dream of acting. Instead, it’s about looking at the vulnerability of that time frame, how we processed it, the good and bad that came with it, and what we can really do with that information now. Case in point: there’s this great moment where she muses about larva becoming butterfly and how they simply have to go in that cocoon stage first. But in that she obverses the telling truth that they “never wanted to be a chrysalis” Of course they didn’t. That stage is awkward and hard and confusing and full of uncomfortable changes. But as she looks at her life now, and looks back at days gone by, she also muses that maybe she “needs to be a chrysalis again.”

For when you pull back and look at the whole movie and all these seemingly random memories, it suddenly makes perfect sense. The ending forces Taeko to contemplate even the idea of a future with Toshio, but instead of engaging the uncomfortable, scary thought, she bristles and runs much as she did so long ago. Turns out, the reason we need our fifth grade selves is to remember that our scared, confused. complicated, internal psychological space never really goes away. The difference with adulthood is that often we’ve just gotten so much better muting that internal space, at saying no, and at putting up walls that protect us. It’s just so easy to get on that train and just head home and never come back. But sometimes you need to put yourself in the chrysalis again, with all the change that comes with it.

It’s the only way you get a chance to run up into the sky.

<3HULK