Daisy Ridley cast opposite Patel.
AB Wire Â
Indian-origin actor Dev Patel will lend his voice to ‘Only Yesterday’, sometimes referred to as the “lost†Studio Ghibli film.
The only one of the Japanese animation giant’s features to have never been released in the United States, the 1991 film is finally getting a showing, with a new English voice cast starring Daisy Ridley and Patel, reported The Columbian.
Directed by Isao Takahata (“The Tale of the Princess Kaguyaâ€), the film is a poetic, yet lucidly rendered, meditation on memory and maturity. Centering on Taeko (Ridley), a 27-year-old Tokyo office worker with no significant other and (apparently) not much of a life, the movie jumps back and forth between the present day and Taeko’s recollections of her fifth-grade self, triggered by a visit to a rural farm belonging to relatives of her married sister.
The memories that surface are both momentous and trivial: the rush of a childhood crush one moment and the experience of eating an unripe pineapple the next. Like Proust’s madeleine, seemingly meaningless triggers release deep thoughts of the past, present and future. “To become a butterfly,†Taeko muses, “one first has to become a chrysalis, even if one never wanted to become one.†It isn’t that Taeko doesn’t want to grow up, but that she doesn’t really know what that means, even after she meets a handsome farmer (Patel) who seems smitten with her, the Columbian report said.
Despite much of the story involving a little girl, “Only Yesterday†is not exactly a kid’s film. An air of grown-up melancholy — underscored by such lovely temporal metaphors as a sunset and night-time shadows on a moving train — will render the film a bit inscrutable for young viewers.
Small moments take on larger meaning in this exquisite memoir. That’s as true of the plot — in which nothing terribly significant happens, except life — as it is of the visuals. A true artist, Takahata imbues every picture with significance, from the coruscation of headlights from a moving car on the leaves of a wet bush to a minute examination of the harvesting of safflower petals.
It’s not just the animation that stirs, but the sound design. Appropriately enough, the film’s original Japanese title, “Omohide poro poro,†translates loosely as “Memories (plop plop).†That’s the onomatopoeic sound made by raindrops, or falling tears.