Only Yesterday (1991)

Many of Isao Takahata's movies have it that when the characters are comfortable, yielding and curved lines dominate.  Angular geometry is emphasized where they're uncomfortable.  It's a simple trick whose effects become complicated depending on exactly what the nature of those places are, or when other elements come into play to affect the film's tone.  Or in Pom Poko, when the tanuki pass through different levels of realism and stylization, becoming cartoons composed of simple, round shapes at moments when they're happy but also vulnerable. 

Only Yesterday is the film that addresses this most directly, and the one that has the most fun with it.  It's about Taeko, a 27-year-old office worker who decides to take a break and visit her distant relatives in the country.  The contours of the countryside in this film aren't quite as stylized as those of the more comfortable places in many of Takahata's other films, and the film acknowledges that whatever characteristics it has are no less artificial than those found elsewhere.  But it still stands in contrast with places and times when Taeko was less comfortable.  We see most of those in flashbacks to when she was 10 years old.  In one of those flashbacks, there's a scene in which Taeko has an awkward encounter with a classmate who has a crush on her.  They stand in the middle of a city grid until they manage to talk to each other and dispel their discomfort.  Then, she walks straight up into the air, above the angular lines, and flies home.

It doesn't attribute Taeko's condition as an adult to specific events in her childhood.  The flashbacks don't determine anything or open lines of thought that are closed later.  Rather, they're here to illustrate Taeko's uniqueness as a person, both through her personal tendencies and by the level of friction between her and the setting, wherever she goes.

In the flashback scenes her sisters mention that Taeko is always asking for little things, while they only ask for big things on rare occasions.  After I heard that, it made sense how her sisters seemed to have carved out places for themselves in a much more significant way than she had.  Before then, it's almost baffling how different they seem from the apparently traditional parents while also being much more conscientious and deferential than Taeko.  They understand how to balance their observation of existing norms and breaking them better than Taeko does.

The adult Taeko says she was like a chrysalis as a child, and that she's now going through a new chrysalis phase.  As a child she struggled learning all the rules, and now she's going somewhere with even more unfamiliar rules.  But she does it by choice this time.  The effort to adapt to a setting gains a new dimension, where alternative settings come into play.  She goes to the country to find the welcoming embrace of nature, and she does find it.  But it's her own inner nature that opens up to her, not the nature of the land.