Tag: omoide poro poro

Shnzzzzzzzzzzzzzz *snrk* zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz… Hmm, huh, what? It’s over? THANK GOODNESS. Summary of the movie: Taeko, a city girl who likes the countryside, works on a farm and reflects back to when she was 10. More boring than it sounds. Work on farm, drive around, remember childhood, hang out with country boy, roll credits, the end.

Only Yesterday (Omohide poro poro) is by far the most boring thing I’ve watched all year. The parts about her childhood were interesting and funny in places, but her adult life is overt pro-farming anti-city propaganda. I have to wonder if Isao Takahata and Studio Ghibli didn’t get a cut from the Japanese Farmer’s Association, since the moral of the story was clearly “If you’re old and can’t find a husband, go to a farming village and some country boy will take you for a wife.” [this is apparently true, btw. Farming villages in Japan suffer from a dire shortage of eligible bachelorettes, especially ones who will put up with all the meddling, lack of privacy and backbreaking work that comes with living in a farming community]

Anyway, it seems like Taeko only idolizes farm life because she grew up in the city. What’s more, it seems she just enjoys it as an occasional break from city-life, and not for its own sake. None of the frequent flashbacks to her childhood show her particularly yearning to live in the countryside, just to visit it from time to time.

Which means once the first glow of excitement wears off and everyone stops treating her like she’s oh-so-special, I won’t be surprised if she falls out of love with farming and wants to go home again. Especially once she wakes up and finds out she’s married to a man she barely knows. The little episode where she was planting rice plus the scene where she makes city-food (cake!) near the end seem to hint at the fact that she isn’t cut out for this kind of life in the long-term. She’s been shown to want what she can’t have (her sister’s bag, the restaurant trip, holidays in the countryside) and to change her mind frequently, and she says she’s grown up but has she really?