James Y. Lee
You would likely never guess that Look Back is from the mind behind Chainsaw Man on first glance. Written as a 143-page one-shot webcomic manga, Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Look Back is noteworthy for its striking intimacy, minimalistic style, and a central duo of characters whom the comic rarely diverts focus from at any point during its story. It is also an immensely touching ode to the artistic process—a story that condenses over a decade of its protagonists’ artistic collaboration into a short-form medium to heighten the immensity of the changes that befall them as they grow, and the sudden nature of the tragedy that befalls them in time. Above all else, even given its recent publication in 2021, it remains a major cultural fixation in contemporary manga, an honest questioning of the value of storytelling that never valorizes its importance or needlessly inflates its cultural position.
Given that the story of Look Back is itself a manga about mangaka (the colloquial Japanese term for manga artists and scribes), there are bound to be numerous moments of self-referentiality strewn throughout, particularly about the oddities and rites of passage of the occupation. Among them is the universally held aspiration of a manga receiving an anime adaptation—which, of course, Look Back did in 2024, via Kiyotaka Oshiyama’s 58-minute adaptation of Look Back, an anime of remarkably adherent faith to Fujimoto’s story. Most noteworthy among its traits is, indeed, its brevity—at once allowing us to experience the actual time through which we experience its protagonists’ story, but also then permitting us to feel when that time passes by quicker than we expect, and when it pivots into a reflective mode that has us contemplating on short notice what we may have missed in that time.
Perhaps legendary Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda—the only correct choice for a live-action adaptation of this material—wanted his own shot at expressing the time we spend in Fujimoto’s world and story. Kore-eda’s humanism has been discussed endless times over throughout his decades-long career; his gentle style of filmmaking, his impeccably nuanced direction of child actors, his compassion for characters in dire straits or incomprehensible states of being, all of which reemerge in his live-action adaptation of Look Back. For the master behind Nobody Knows, After Life, and the Palme d’Or-winning Shoplifters, Fujimoto’s manga was a reckoning with the role of art in our world, one that Kore-eda first experienced at the top of the pandemic, where the shuttering of his projects had him ruminating on the implications of his sudden obsolescence as a filmmaker. There’s real poetry in the fact that said reflection was prompted by a manga whose most pivotal question is “Why do you draw?”—thrown out into the void, answered only by the unspoken action of drawing itself. And so, it seems, Kore-eda took the hint and continued making films, too, once the pandemic settled— hopeful that the action itself would lead him to the answer, or even be the answer entirely.
Central to Look Back‘s tale are two young women and aspiring artists, who we’re first introduced to as fierce, if not one-sided, rivals. Ayumu Fujino (played in her elementary school years by Fuuri Nanase) is nothing short of a star in fourth grade; whenever the school newspaper publishes, it always features two four-panel manga strips from the kids, and Fujino’s comics always make the cut, with a witty sense of humor and imagination carrying her forward. But competition emerges from the shadows. The sudden emergence of recluse student and artistic prodigy Kyomoto (Rokka Okada, in Kyomoto’s younger years) is a shock to both Fujino’s system and her reputation. Both of their comics feature in the newspaper, but Kyomoto’s drawing game is on another level entirely, portraying extremely detailed sprawls of scenery that shock and inspire awe in even the teachers who stumble upon them. Fujino refuses to be beaten down by Kyomoto’s thunder-stealing momentum, going to the local bookstore and studying up on refining her drawing skills—but defeatedly drops out of the school newspaper’s manga game entirely in sixth grade.
Graduation arrives for Fujino and Kyomoto’s year once they reach grade six—but Kyomoto hasn’t shown up to pick up her diploma, so their teacher (a devoted fan of Fujino and Kyomoto’s work in the school paper, of course), encourages Fujino to deliver Kyomoto’s diploma to her place to get them to know each other. Fujino reluctantly accepts, arriving at Kyomoto’s empty family home, where on the floor of the building are what appear to be dozens, if not hundreds, of notebooks lying along a hallway. Keeping to herself in her room, Kyomoto doesn’t respond to Fujino’s calls out to her, so Fujino draws a small, sarcastic four-panel comic declaring Kyomoto the reigning regent of the shut-ins—before a gust of wind blows the strip under Kyomoto’s door, and Fujino runs away in a panic. But Kyomoto sees the strip, emerges from her room, and catches up to Fujino, adorably declaring her fandom and respect, even going so far as to call Fujino sensei, and earnestly wanting to work with her in the future.
And so, their friendship begins. Elated at receiving the respect of someone she always envied, Fujino runs home through the rain in absolute glee—and in the years that come, their friendship evolves into a fully blown pre-professional career. They draw one-shot comics together in Fujino’s bedroom, earning the admiration of a manga publishing house that gives them increasingly higher-profile opportunities for visibility over the years. True to her prowess with scenery, Kyomoto (played as a young adult by Aju Makita) takes over much of the backgrounds, while Fujino (now played by Natsuki Deguchi) devises concepts and characters with her, and is more than happy to pitch their projects to professionals as the introverted Kyomoto silently watches. As their careers grow together, so do their professional ambitions, as well as their personal lives—Fujino inspires Kyomoto to step out of her shell, and Kyomoto continues to let Fujino explore her wide and expansive range of ideas. (They even portmanteau their names into the pen name “Kyo Fujino,” itself an interesting moniker to consider as a different variant of Fujimoto’s own surname.) But their paths diverge eventually… and a harrowing turn occurs that gently brings a new, unconsidered dimension to how their friendship could have gone, and the kind of people they would have been in another life.
If all of this is familiar to fans of the manga and/or the anime, that’s largely because Kore-eda’s adaptation is immensely faithful to both, trusting in the most pivotal events of Fujimoto’s story and the impact of how they’ve been structured. If any variance does exist, it’s in the fact that his adaptation of Look Back is roughly 100 minutes long, over 40 minutes longer than Oshiyama’s anime. The addition of this material isn’t necessarily the stuffing in of additional, extraneous scenes so much as it is a temporal expansion of the existing story, which allows it room to breathe, and gives us the time to live more deeply in Fujino and Kyomoto’s burgeoning friendship before it all radically shifts, deepening the story’s eventual blows. It’s a deeply appropriate choice of pace for a live-action adaptation of a manga about mangaka, lending its central artists a flesh-and-blood tactility that firmly separates them from the art that they draw, and allows them to be that much more identifiable because of how clearly they derive inspiration from the real, observable world around them.
And how gorgeous that real world is, indeed. The rural village that Fujino and Kyomoto live in and regularly take trains in and out of undergoes countless seasonal changes, all of which Kore-eda and cinematographer Senzo Ueno render in delightful 35mm textures. Sunlight hits the window of Fujino’s room at remarkable angles and offer a visually soft warmth to whenever Fujino and Kyomoto are hard at work on their next manga. The two of them regularly have to trudge their way through snow every winter, filmed to look as soft as clouds while also being complemented by Kazuhiko Tomita’s sound design capturing every crunch of their footsteps. And that sound design recurs as a grounding force whenever our two leads sketch away at their manga—from their pencils, to their dip ink pens, to the styluses they use for electronic tablets, the repeated strikes at their canvases taking on the same feeling as a writer’s keyboard clicking away.
It’s hard to talk about the ultimate merits of Look Back as a story without disclosing a major part of the tonal shift it takes, and the narrative turning point that gets them there. But without simply giving away the whole game, it becomes readily apparent in time that Look Back is also about the helplessness of art to completely alleviate the pain that comes with life, nor to cope with the senselessness of random tragedy. Kore-eda understands Fujimoto’s intention here; that storytelling is a form of control over our lives and those of others, but only in a way that reflects sentiments or anxieties rather than resolving them head-on. And as powerful as art can be for catharsis, its potential for regret is strong—it is a profession that asks total vulnerability of its participants and thanks them in return with the realization that the work you have devoted your whole being to will cease to be yours once it is “complete.” “Why do you draw?”—why, indeed, when you could do anything else with your time that can concretely reward you, that can offer you the freedom to try other things with your life instead of asking of you total personal sublimation?
The crushing weight of this regret becomes painfully apparent by the time Look Back hits its home stretch—a movingly dreamlike understanding of how inevitably intertwined Fujino and Kyomoto’s lives are. None but Kore-eda would have been equipped to understand of this on such a sincere and true level, a reckoning with the power of art charged with a sentimentally profound human connection, which only can emerge in a piece of art when the artist believes wholesale in its possibility. To that end, what brings Look Back all the way to home base is its quartet of its central performers—Nanase and Okada, Makita and Deguchi—who feel as though they grow in front of your eyes, who retain their traits and chemistry across generations, and who Kore-eda rightfully trusted to carry the beating heart of Fujimoto’s story. So much of this film’s success counts on their ability to deliver Kyo Fujino to us, and they do it radiant and smiling, inspired and hopeful, mourning yet determined. Kore-eda understands that no light in Look Back is brighter than that of these four, and his interpretation of Look Back ultimately soars because of that generosity.
