Saturday 14 May 2016

The Dendy Newtown is playing Studio Ghibli's Only Yesterday


The Dendy Cinema at Newtown, being the sort of place that it is, is currently showing Studio Ghibli's Only Yesterday, which is a good one to be able to see.

I'm biased, I love the Studio, and I love the different directors who rock and roll therein. Only Yesterday is sort of strange in the line up. It's the one (next to probably Ocean Waves) that's been east available here in Australia.

I can't back that claim with real information, but it feels that way. It's rarely including in the film festivals, it doesn't get its own individual screenings (until now), and it was the least frequently stocked, even when everyone started stocking 'all' the Ghibli films.

The assumptions I've made as the causes of this are that it's a non-fantastical drama, it wasn't dubbed into English until recently, and probably mostly because it isn't a Hayao Miyazaki Ghibli film.

These don't at all influence the quality of the film. It's very good. I enjoy it greatly. But it does make it harder to market than a lot of the others that have been made available. It is also the sort of film that they didn't need to make as an animated film. It might've been cheaper to go live action in fact. Maybe not. There is some 1960s' stuff in there that might've made it hard, but it's definitely not your standard fare. Well, there is more this sort of thing now, but still not piles of it. Maybe there is literally piles of it somewhere. I don't know where that is. I don't get to see it.

It was directed by Isao Takahata, who is responsible for Pom Poko, The Tale of Princess Kaguya, and the incredible and totally heartbreaking Grave of the Fireflies. Takahata is, to me, one of those directors that you turn up for, and to that point I'm not going to tell you much about Only Yesterday, except that it was written for, targeted at, and incredibly well received by adults.



It wasn't one of the Ghibli films that I saw before adulthood, so I can't tell you what a child might think of it, but there things in it that make sense when you have a childhood to look back on. It also probably helps if you grew up in the country, and then lived in the city later, but I can't comment to that, because it wasn't my life. Didn't impact my appreciation of the film. I love it, but I love all the Ghibli drama stuff.

If you're interested in heading out to see it, the times and days through May that I'm aware of are listed below:

Saturday, 14th
2:15pm   |   6:40pm

Sunday, 15th
2:10pm   |   7:00pm

Monday, 16th
2:15pm   |   7:00pm

Tuesday, 17th
2:15pm   |   7:00pm

Wednesday, 18th
2:15pm   |   7:00pm

Pick one. Go and see it. It's very highly regarded for a very good reason. Sheep up, people! Get on the bandwagon!

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