Only Yesterday (Memories Come Tumbling Down)

A carefully-wrought, subtle drama from Studio Ghibli's other great maestro Isao Takahata. It reminded me a bit of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, in that the depiction of the protagonist's childhood puts her adult character in perspective, although the connections are elliptical and sometimes mysterious. Nevertheless a picture emerges of a spirited young girl who is overlooked, insulted and on one occasion straight-up abused by her family – not out of spite or ill-will, but because her parents are tired and confused and don't have the emotional resources to support their youngest child. The result is an outwardly successful young woman with a job in Tokyo who feels like a ghost.

The solution to Taeko's alienation is a holiday to the countryside, where she joins the villagers in their back-breaking agricultural work. The family relationships she discovers there go some way towards mending the traumas buried in her past. The contrast between town and country is a well-worn trope, but the most impressive thing about the film is that it always endeavours to strike a balance between idealism and realism. An example is the organic farmer lecturing on the importance of respecting nature, but also admitting to using weedkiller because there just isn’t enough agricultural labour in modern times to pull the weeds out by hand.

Another example comes at the end when the possibility is raised of Taeko giving up life in the city and finding romance in the countryside. She treats this as a ridiculous suggestion and describes it as something out of a film. The irony, of course, is that this is a film, and in the final moments she does turn back. But this surrender is presented as a fantasy – it's part of the credits sequence where the music swells and the ghosts of the past appear to guide Taeko to happiness. It's where the film abandons verisimilitude and turns overtly film-like, and the balance tips into unadulterated romanticism. It feels like something that happens after the story has ended and Taeko goes back to Tokyo. I suspect Takahata wanted to give his audience a reward for persevering with the difficult work of a woman coming to terms with her past. But that reward is offered grudgingly, presented as a flight of fancy – almost an afterthought. As Taeko says, it's something that happens in films but is impossible in real life.

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya

A very long adaptation of a Japanese fairytale from Studio Ghibli. The court vs country dichotomy it sets up – whereby the titular heroine wants nothing more than to frolic with the peasant children while her father does his best to marry her off to the wealthy and powerful – is laboured. And the finale, in which a mean silent Buddha kidnaps the Princess so she can live with her own people on the moon, is more than a little ridiculous. But behind these conflicts is the more simple and devastating story of two parents trying to make their child happy and getting it disastrously wrong. Perhaps I'm in a sentimental mood, but it's the second time I've been teary at watching a film this weekend.

The Little Norse Prince

When I borrowed this DVD, I didn't realise just how old the film is. It's part of the Studio Ghibli Collection, but it was made before the Studio even existed, all the way back in 1968. Miyazaki was an animator, and it's the debut feature by Isao Takahata, who went on to direct the seminal Grave of the Fireflies. While The Little Norse Prince is a kids film, with lots of cute talking animals and songs, some of the social and political concerns of Takahata's later work can be found here in embryonic form. Most notably, the emphasis placed early and often on the importance of the community acting as a single force against external enemies. Grunwald, the sorcerer villain, has wolves, owls and sea-monsters as his servants, and can represent both a manifestation of the malevolence of the natural world and the individualistic domination of it by arrogant humans. He offers eternal life to chosen 'siblings', but this comes at the expense of the humanity held in common with your fellow man. Hilda professes to be alone but not lonely, but becomes bitterly conflicted when observing the wedding rituals of the community. The film even includes a subtle suggestion of sexual frustration and jealousy in the character, when the other women laugh at her because she doesn't know how to use a "needle". Our straight-laced hero Hols doesn't always stick to the script – going off to confront the Big Bad on his own. But these forays are not conclusively successful. Only when he unites the village around him does he prevail against Grunwald. His "Sword of the Sun" is pulled out of a stone – he is a king-in-training who unifies and focuses the general will. The parallel with the constitutional role of the Japanese Emperor is all too apparent.

Grave of the Fireflies

I had been forewarned that this was not only a brilliant WW2 film but a guaranteed tear-jerker, so I watched it with a guarded attitude, not wanting to give in to whatever emotional manipulation was in store. I'm quite glad I did, because while the film does not manipulate you and I was locked out of sharing the intense impact it has on others, another aspect does open up when you approach it in this way.

The firefly metaphor can't help but encourage readings of the film as a critique of the senseless destruction of war. The fireflies represent the people caught up in the war, and more broadly of the brief lives we all lead, and the fate we all share. In one scene, they remind the protagonist of watching a naval parade, and all the proud, patriotic and violent feelings the spectacle stirred within him. He sits up shooting an imaginary machine gun at the air, but the night is peaceful, underlining the embarrassing nature of the outburst.

But there is more buried under this rather unsubtle metaphor. For one, the director has made explicitly clear that the film does not contain a pacifist message. Instead, he draws attention to how the brother and sister fail to survive because of their decision to isolate themselves from kith and kin. This is a difficult perspective to get because we are so invested in Seita and Setsuko's story and their aunt really is mean and conniving. Nonetheless, it is inescapably true that their decision to live apart and alone dooms them both in the end. Independence and individualism is seductive but dangerous. When the film mourns the death of Setsuko, we don't look back to her life before the film starts. We only get images of her playing in the cave – when she was most free, but also when she was most vulnerable.

The end of the film shows the ghosts of Seita and Setsuko looking over a city, an effect Scorsese pinched for his Gangs of New York. Japan's current prosperity is built over the suffering of the generation that experienced the war, and Isao Takanaka may have intended the shot to be a pointed reminder of that fact. If so, the siblings emerge as more noble than the decadent present generation, but they have also made the same mistake – succumbing to a very modern individualist ideal and rejecting the ties that bind a community together.