Trivia / Only Yesterday

• Children Voicing Children: In both the original Japanese track and the English dub, most of the child characters (including young Taeko) are voiced by actual children. Taeko's friends Tsuneko and Aiko are the exceptions, being voiced by Hope Levy and Stephanie Sheh.
• Late Export for You: The film took the longest time to be localized into English, having been one of the only Ghibli films not released on DVD or Blu-ray in America. Finally, in 2016, GKIDS and Universal ran the film in indie theaters across the country, and released it on Blu-ray and DVD on July 5 that year. Reportedly, Disney didn't release the film because of the talk of menstruation and Miramax's treatment of Princess Mononoke, which becomes even more ironic considering Disney released an animated short in the forties titled The Story of Menstruation and that Disney would later release Pixar's Turning Red, which had even more explicit references to menstruation.
• Real Song Theme Tune: The ending theme is a Japanese cover of Bette Midler's "The Rose".
• Studio Hop: Starting with this film, Toho became the exclusive distributor for Studio Ghibli's theatrical releases.
• Underage Casting: The English dub has 23-year-old Daisy Ridley voice the 27-year-old Taeko.
• What Could Have Been: Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki wanted to turn the original Omoide Poro Poro manga into a film, but he decided he was not up to the task of adapting it. Nonetheless, the idea stayed on his mind while he was working on various other childrens' films. Eventually, he pitched the film to Takahata.

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