Only Yesterday (Daniel Riquelme)

Only Yesterday:  Omohide poro poro. (Isao Takahata, Ghibli Studios, 1991)

http://www.animeid.tv/ver/omohide-poro-poro-1

This movie is about an office worker who started to question about her life. Her name is Taeko and she is 27. I don’t want to spoil the movie at all, so I’m going to focus my discourse only in the main themes treated in the movie and connect them with Virginia Woolf’s sense of tunneling in Mrs. Dalloway.

Taeko bored of her routine and life, decided to travel to the countryside where, as the last summer, she help her grandmother in agriculture work. During her trip, she started to remember herself when she was on fifth grade. She remembered many episodes of her childhood that shaped her character and identity.

“Even the more trivial things came lively, filling my mind just like watching a movie, and overwriting my real me” - While remembering (tunneling), sometimes through visions, she realized that society obliged you to follow some rules, she thought that life was just like math; If you follow the procedure you will success in life. But this trip would totally change her mind, the connections made during the trip and the experiences lived with the characters of the countryside made her suffer a metamorphosis, just like a caterpillar changing into a pupa just waiting to become into a butterfly.

Just like Mrs. Dalloway, the process of tunneling had a vital role in the protagonist; she realized how the structured life helps in the process of losing the personal identity. She grew up learning prejudices about how life must to be lived; doing what is correct.

Also, she met a man called Toshio who is working on a revival of organic agriculture, he grew up in the countryside and his dream was to live in the city; Tokyo. His simplicity showed Taeko that sometimes life is not that structured, and everyone needs to make its way through this almost unbreakable wall in order to keep alive the identity, and to feel alive (moment of being).

At the end, she made up her mind and realized that that was her moment to abolish all the prejudices and start living the life that she wants.

Are we living the life that we want? Are memories making us question the person we have become? Are we truly alive? Or are we following the life that society proposes?

Maybe we can find the answers to these questions asking them to our inner child that every time that he can knocks our mind to make us notice the signs that we have to follow to find our identity in this structured world.  

Daniel Riquelme C.