Perhaps Takahata's best work, certainly Only Yesterday is one of the greatest anime films of the last three decades, daring to use the studio's jewel-like color and superb command of technique not in the service of depicting fantasy, science fiction, or war, but to show the infinite value of an ordinary life lived in ordinary times. Flashing between the 1966 youth and 1982 maturity of its protagonist Taeko, Only Yesterday gives a rich and quiet voice to its Tokyo office worker who journeys into the countryside to commune with the ghost of her childhood.-Carl Horn