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Only Yesterday is structured much like Coleridge’s poem, Frost at Midnight, in which childhood memories are mediated by a nostalgia for the quiet simplicity of country life in the hopes that one can reimagine one’s childhood more quietly, more simply.

The ending is cute overload, with children from her memories helping her out of the Tokyo-bound train, leading her to her newfound love, and joyously marching through the streets. All of this feels like a tease, yet Taeko finally seems happy to be moving toward something more satisfying than being stuck in the same dysfunctional place.

This is hushed, delicate, detail-oriented filmmaking of the highest quality. The story is told through glances and expressions, and is more interested in capturing inner feeling than it is plot points or conventional characterisation.

Only Yesterday can sometimes seem a little too random in what it chooses to show, but it has a cumulative power as Taeko comes to understand that the past that shaped her needn't define her. That's a remarkably sophisticated theme for any film, let alone a cartoon. But then what else should we expect from a filmmaker so precise that he'd spend five minutes describing the exact texture and taste of a piece of fruit?

In the end, Only Yesterday is as gentle and non-coercive as Toshio is strident, even allowing Taeko's realization about her childhood behavior, and where it brought her, to register as at most a half-epiphany about her still developing subjectivity — more a question than an exclamation mark at the end of a long dialogue with the past. Some might find this inconclusiveness frustrating, but it's entirely of a piece with the humbleness of Takahata's storytelling.

The first great movie of 2016, as far as U.S. releases go, is an animated picture that was made in 1992: Takahata's breathtakingly beautiful and quietly but devastatingly moving "Only Yesterday.

Isao Takahata, an Academy Award nominee and one of the twin pillars of the anime giant Studio Ghibli, brings the cleareyed grace of his animation to the lovely memoiristic story of a 27-year-old woman in "Only Yesterday." As the woman, Takao, goes on a vacation in the country that brings back grade-school memories, Mr. Takahata finds a poignancy in milestones and ordinary moments alike, showing her sense of self deepening over time.

Only Yesterday's ecological message is both passionate and complex... In tying together these various psychological, ecological, economic, and sociopolitical resonances in a film about a young woman's journey toward romantic fulfillment, Takahata creates a work that transcends its generic and cultural trappings to say something vitally basic about the transience of life's small disappointments and redemptions.

Half coming-of-age story, half adult drama, the film demonstrates Takahata's belief that animation need not be limited to children's fantasy.

Never released in the U.S. in theatres or on Region 1 DVD, the reflective tear-jerking masterpiece ONLY YESTERDAY is almost certainly the best Miyazaki production you haven't seen. Combining Truffaut at his most personal and critical with Ozu at his most laid-back (with just a touch of Rohmer—see SUMMER below), ONLY YESTERDAY follows the shy office worker Taeko as she vacations to the beautiful rural Yamagata valley to work on her cousins' small farm.