Trivia

The movie is based on a manga series of comic vignettes of a small girl. The scenes in the film portraying Taeko as an adult were created by writer-director Isao Takahata. The adult scenes gave the entire film a plot and connected the original vignettes as recollections of her childhood, making it a cohesive whole.

This film is regarded as a pioneering achievement in Japanese animation because the muscular movements of the characters when talking or smiling, particularly in the present-day sequences (with the adult Taeko), were rendered with what was then considered unparalleled realism.

The Walt Disney Company acquired the US distribution rights from Studio Ghibli-Tokuma as part of a more comprehensive rights agreement. Disney decided it would not release Only Yesterday in the US due to references to menstruation in the film. A clause in Studio Ghibli's distribution contract prohibited Disney from altering the scene to remove the references. GKIDS has since acquired the rights from Disney and Ghibli, and released an English dubbed version that was distributed by Universal Pictures, making this the first Studio Ghibli film to be dubbed into English by Universal Pictures.

In the final scene, the arrow symbol that the children are holding over the heads of Taeko and Toshino is an "Ai Ai Gasa" (Love Love Umbrella or Together Umbrella), it implies that they are an item. The names of boy and girl are written on each side of a vertical line on the arrow. It is the Japanese equivalent of a western Valentine heart.

It was a surprise box office smash when first released in Japan; it was the highest grossing domestic film in 1991 grossing ¥1.87 billion.