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Haunted female childhoods are de rigueur in the animé world of Studio Ghibli head Hayao Miyazaki. The Spirited Away director merely produced this two-hour stroll down Watercolour Lane, but it shares his deep nostalgia for the rural Japan of his youth.

The film itself is weighted with nostalgia in its home country, where it was originally released in 1991. Starting with a three-part manga that dealt only with little Taeko’s middle-school passage, director Isao Takahata (responsible for Ghibli’s best-known non-Miyazakis, like Grave of the Fireflies) set the tale in 1982 and invented scenes of the 27-year-old Taeko looking back at 1966, when modern electronics and fresh foreign fruit were new to most Japanese.

Only Yesterday also deals with previously hidden aspects of school days, such as learning disabilities and the beginnings of menstruation—causing squeamish U.S. distributor Disney to drop the film. Now its back in a spiffy 25th-anniversary release, with an English-language voice cast led by current Star Wars heroine Daisy Ridley as the adult Taeko and England’s Dev Patel (with his accent somewhat jarring among a mostly U.S. and Canadian cast) as the young organic farmer she meets when returning to the bucolic countryside she loved as a kid.

The tale’s overlapping timelines sometimes create patience-straining repetition, especially when Taeko’s insistent voice-over explains or simply describes what we’ve already seen. It rarely takes advantage of the physics-defying nature of animation itself. (There’s one flying sequence.)

Still, it’s remarkable how many early traumas—both banal and highly specific—it addresses in its soft pastel way. “It would better,” our shy protagonist’s depressive mother (Grey Griffin) tells her, “to be a girl who eats what she’s given than to be one who writes slightly better essays than everyone else.” Ouch!

Be sure to stick around for the upbeat payoff, which happens during the final credits.