Only Yesterday | おもひでぽろぽろ Animezing
Drama
Presented by JICC, Embassy of Japan
One of the top 100 animated films of all time.
A touching, melancholy meditation on life.
From Academy Award®-nominated director Isao Takahata (The Tale of The Princess Kaguya) and general producer Hayao Miyazaki, Only Yesterday is a masterpiece of time and tone, rich with humor and stirring emotion, and beautifully animated by one of the world's most revered animation studios..
It’s 1982, and Taeko 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, 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.
Starring Miki Imai, Toshiro Yanagiba, Youko Honna
WOMEN IN CINEMA
ABOUT THE ANIMATOR
Michiyo Yasuda was an animator and color designer whose career spanned over five decades. Her use of color had a powerful influence on the trademark Ghibli look. In an interview with the L.A. Times she remarked “Color has meaning, and it makes the film more easily understood. Colors and pictures can enhance what the situation is on screen.”
Yasuda had worked for Toei Animation, Nippon Animation, and Studio Ghibli. Her career began at Toei as a tracer and she worked alongside Hayao Miyazaki for Hols: Prince of the Sun (1968), the first film directed by Studio Ghibli co-founder, Isao Takahata.
She then went to Nippon Animation and work as color designer on such productions as 3000 Leagues in Search of Mother (1976), Future Boy Conan (1978), and another Takahata helmed production, Anne of Green Gables (1979). After working on 1984’s Nausicää of the Valley of the Wind Yasuda was put in charge of the color department of the newly formed Studio Ghibli. Since then, she has been color designer for nearly every single Studio Ghibli production, including their most beloved films such as Castle of the Sky (1986), Grave of the Fireflies (1988), Porco Rosso (1992), Whisper of the Heart (1995), Princess Mononoke (1997), Spirited Away (2001), and Howl’s Moving Castle (2004). She also worked on many of the short films shown at the Ghibli Museum in Tokyo.
Although she retired after working on Ponyo (2008), she returned to work on Miyazaki’s final film, The Wind Rises in 2013. In 2011 she was recognized for her work and received the Animation Lifetime Achievement Award from the Japanese Movie Critics Awards. In 2007 a book was published celebrating her career titled The Color Artisan of Animation. It has yet to be published in English.
Michiyo Yasuda passed away on October 5, 2016 at the age of 77.
Japanese w. English subtitles | Rated PG | 118 min | 1991 | Directed by Isao Takahata
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