‘Look Back’ Review: Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Manga Masterpiece Becomes a Beautiful Hour of Anime

Look Back’s protagonist, Fujino (voiced by Yuumi Kawai), is introduced drawing gag manga strips for her elementary school newspaper. Her classmates all love her work, but she’s jealous of the more complex art in the paper’s other strip, drawn by the always-absent Kyomoto (Mizuki Yoshida). Fujino pushes herself to improve her drawing skills up until the middle of sixth grade, when she rejects manga as a weird otaku hobby – until she finally meets Kyomoto, an actual weirdo otaku who’s obsessed with Fujino’s art, and decides to collaborate with her.

From there, we follow this opposites-attract friendship and artistic partnership develop until the two girls go their separate ways as adults – and then it gets dark. The original manga was published on the two-year anniversary of the 2019 arson attack on Kyoto Animation (the beloved anime studio behind the likes of Haruhi Suzumiya and Sound Euphonium), and the central tragedy mirrors those real events. Even without that real world context, the ending of Look Back is a serious tearjerker, addressing issues of grief, regret, and why we even make art in the first place despite the nihilistic urge to just give up.

The 143-page manga one-shot, by Chainsaw Man creator Tatsuki Fujimoto, was released by Shonen Jump+ with no prior announcement in July 2021. Word among manga fans quickly spread that this was a “drop everything and just read it” work of brilliance. Talking about what makes it so great, however, necessitates some degree of spoilers, so unless you require certain violence-based trigger warnings, the best way to first experience the story of Look Back is to just go in without knowing anything about it. But, you can read the manga right now as part of Viz’s $1.99/month Shonen Jump web subscription and in a print volume you should be able to find at your local library.

As a story about making manga, Look Back felt perfect for the manga medium, but Oshiyama adapts it to animation in ways that benefit the material. He adds a bit more humor and stylistic variety by expanding upon Fujino’s childhood gag manga, while haruka nakamura’s musical score heightens the story’s emotional impact without overwhelming it. Striking camera movements build up the manga’s already cinematic layouts. The manga conveyed an impressive amount of expression and character personality in still frames, but the anime’s full movement makes the character performances all the more affecting.

Fujimoto’s art style, simultaneously rough-edged and hyper-detailed, is challenging to adapt to animation. Chainsaw Man successfully made the jump to TV by changing the art style for a more restrained approach; the show looked better than 98% of TV animation yet still disappointed some fans for not fully capturing the manga’s feel. As a movie, Look Back is able to get closer to the grittiness of its source material’s look while still maintaining a high quality. This is the first major production spearheaded by Oshiyama’s Studio Durian, though animators from a dozen or so other major studios are also credited. Oshiyama, known in the anime industry as a workaholic for his multitasking on Space Dandy and Flip Flappers, reportedly drew half of Look Back’s key animation frames himself.

Only one scene presents a relative weakness: the final memory montage is done entirely with still images. Perhaps the stillness is intentional for the sake of abstraction, but it also makes you feel like you could just be reading the manga instead. At worst, it feels unfinished – and knowing the film’s world premiere screening at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival two weeks before its Japanese release was in an unfinished state, I wonder if this sequence could have still received some additional polish if the animators had extra time or budget.

But that’s a small quibble about such a gorgeous dramatization of such stirring material. Look Back’s reflections on the struggles of artistic creation feel even more relevant today than they did when the manga first came out. Both the message of its story and the quality of its production now play as rejoinders to the threat of A.I. After watching the anime, many viewers will want to immediately pick up a pencil… once they’ve put down their tissues, anyway.

Look Back’s runtime of just under an hour is perfect for adapting the manga; any shorter and it would be missing something, much longer and it would feel drawn out. This unusual format – too long to qualify as a short film, but much shorter than what normally plays in theaters – may complicate American release plans, which have yet to be announced. However, Japanese moviegoers are packing theaters to see it, so hopefully someone takes a chance on bringing the movie to American theaters. Perhaps GKIDS could release it as a double-bill with their just-licensed Naoko Yamada short film Garden of Remembrance for a fuller runtime and even fuller hearts?

Grade: A-

This review is from the Japan Cuts Film Festival in New York. There is currently no U.S. distribution.