Only Yesterday

Aroview: Studio Ghibli's most 'adult' offering is a moving, poignantly drawn rumination on childhood and regret, told through the eyes of a disenchanted 27-year-old woman, who finds herself reliving the past vicariously through the people and places of her cherished youth.

An office worker in the throws of a 'quater-life crisis', the film plays out between the woman's pilgrimage back to her roots, and her most formative memories as a schoolgirl in the sixties, achieving a rare blend of maturity and imagination along the way; a romantic longing for the inner child that's as much MY NEIGHBOUR TOTORO as it is CINEMA PARADISO. True to his war masterpiece GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES, dir. Takahata's canvas lends itself as easily to live action as it does anime – though his intimately conceived vignettes of past and present are animated lusciously, and with a real yearning for nostalgia. Kleenex recommended.

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