If Toei studio pioneered Japan's postwar tradition of anime feature filmmaking, it was its young animator Isao Takahata who asserted the concept of the anime feature film-maker with the struggle to direct his 1968 agitprop fairy tale Prince of the Sun: The Great Adventure of Horus. Takahata's 1994 Pompoko was the first anime feature to be submitted for an Oscar. Yet Only Yesterday is perhaps Takahata's best and purest work, and certainly one of the greatest anime films of the last four decades, daring to use Studio Ghibli's jewel-like color and superb command of technique not in the service of depicting fantasy, science fiction, or even 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.