Games

Look Back Speaks to the Artist in All of Us

Published

1 month ago

October 12, 2024

Christoph Rediske

Key Takeaways

Table of Contents

Look Back is a profound film about the struggles and joys of creating manga, touching hearts with relatable themes.
The story follows the journey of two young artists as they face hardships, learn from each other, and grow together.
Director Oshiyama’s visual choices celebrate human-made art at a time when AI is prevalent, an intent that lends the film added weight.

Title	Look Back
Director	Kiyotaka Oshiyama Advertisement
Studio	Durian
Release Date	6/28/2024 (Japan), 10/3/2024 (North America)

There’s something inherently compelling about anime that depicts the creation of anime, manga, or just art in general, that can connect with audiences on a deeper level whether they’re artists or not. Studio Durian’s Look Back, a film about drawing manga, has had a similarly profound impact on audiences since hitting theaters in North America recently, and the praise is well deserved.

Based on the one-shot by Tatsuki Fujimoto of Chainsaw Man fame, originally published on July 19, 2021, Look Back follows two girls who bond over their shared aspirations for creating manga. The film is directed by Kiyotaka Oshiyama, Studio Durian’s founder, the director of 2016’s Flip Flappers, and an animator on Devilman: Crybaby, Space Dandy, and many more.

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The Joy and Pain of Drawing

When the viewer meets Ayumu Fujino, it’s in silence, but a silence filled with as much meaning as possible. The tapping of her feet, the sighs and grunts of frustration, and the lively rhythm of a pencil on paper fill the room as this young illustrator contends with the imperfections staring back at her on the page. She may only be in fourth grade, but the silent battle in front of her is relatable to any artisan, no matter their age.

Next, her focus is replaced with elation as the film cuts to her in class the next day, taking in the praises of her classmates over her hilarious new four-panel manga in the school newspaper. First-time voice actress Yumi Kawai perfectly captures the thinly-veiled cockiness of a pre-adolescent with blossoming talent. It’s that feeling of pride that swells inside you at an age when one displays the potential for high achievement before having wrestled with the learning curve.

How Look Back Tackles the Hardships of Pursuing Art

If the above-described scene awakens a sense of nostalgia, the film itself is a tidal wave of relatable struggle painted in vivid detail. When Kyomoto, a student who never attends school, begins submitting her own manga for the school newspaper, Fujino is devastated by how much this girl’s art is better than hers. A rivalry, then. Fujino throws herself into the craft, looking through illustration books, futilely searching for shortcuts, and filling out piles of sketchbooks.

And yet, as time passes, she can’t fight a feeling of inadequacy all too familiar to anyone who has ever looked at their pen and aspired to create more. It almost makes her quit. Look Back begins as a lesson in the hardships and dedication required to improve as an artist, and how daunting that can be to a young mind when weighed against the joys one might sacrifice for it. But everything changes when Fujino finally meets Kyomoto.

A Promise to Get Better Together

Kyomoto is a shut-in who is afraid to speak to others, but she can’t resist rushing to greet Fujino, regarding her as a “manga genius.” Fujino isn’t sure how to take it all at first, but quickly, her motivation to draw that got sapped from her comes back with a vengeance and the two quickly become not just friends, but partners. Fujino’s talent for drawing characters and Kyomoto’s talent for backgrounds combine and the story follows their journey to become better artists.

More than that, it’s about how they help each other to grow as people. For Fujino, this means contending with the reason she draws in the first place, while for Kyomoto, her journey is not only about learning to face her fear of other people but to face it alone. Their journeys may take them to different places, but they’ll always look back on their time together as something beautiful and irreplaceable – that made them who they are.

Whether as artists, introverts, or just humans who owe a great deal to the people in their lives, this film has a way of touching hearts that is earned through how much the creators poured into the project.

Reactions to this film online have been almost as endearing as the film itself, to the extent that the film warrants a rewatch to experience it through fresh eyes alone. Whether as artists, introverts, or just humans who owe a great deal to the people in their lives, this film has a way of touching hearts that is earned through how much the creators poured into the project.

Look Back Is A Special Kind of Beautiful

Given the length of the source material, the film is rather short, but GKIDS’ theatrical screening – at least as of the time of writing – features a post-show. It features interviews with the director as well as Fujino and Kyomoto’s actresses, Yuumi Kawai and Mizuki Yoshida. During my screening, it was a delight to see that everyone stayed after the show to watch it. It genuinely allows one to appreciate the film even more.

Director Oshiyama was already an impressive animator, but this film will likely put him on the map in a big way. The way he talked about the project, what it meant to him as he was creating it, and the extent of his work on the film, really speaks to his virtuosity. He leveraged the benefits of the animated medium while incorporating certain visual principles to capture the manga’s art style.

Is This the Most Faithful Manga Adaptation?

He states in the interview that he didn’t want the designs to feel fixed and that there was a degree of human error in the artwork that was crucial to preserve a sort of manga feel. One can feel it in the oftentimes wispy line art that always looks pencil drawn. Oshiyama also emphasized that the film wasn’t only a celebration of manga art, but in particular, background art.

In the places where the film expands on the source material, it never oversteps its bounds and merely strives to translate and add texture to the emotions conveyed in the manga. One of the best examples has to be when Fujino finds herself skipping through the rain on her way home after meeting Kyomoto. With no dialog and only Haruka Nakamura’s score in the background, the sequence is a powerhouse of emotion conveyed through the character acting alone.

The Profound Meaning Beneath the Surface

What makes Look Back feel particularly special, both in the context of the original manga and this animated adaptation, are the circumstances in which it was created. Fujimoto’s one-shot was largely a tribute to the lives lost in the Kyoto Animation arson attack of 2019, with parts of the narrative clearly alluding to those events.

As for the anime, Oshiyama talked about how he kept the changing landscape of animation – and art in general – in the back of his head during production. Many of the above-described stylistic choices were conceived out of a desire to celebrate human-made art at a time when AI poses a meaningful threat to artistic expression. With that in mind, the human errors so delicately preserved in every frame carry far more weight than normal.

Oshiyama described Look Back as “a song of praise for creators” and nothing could be more accurate. It is a lesson about the hardships endured to create things yet, in the same breath, it is a reminder of the friendships fostered through creation which make those hardships worth it. Most importantly, for every soul that is afraid to open their hearts to others, it is an invitation to the contrary, crafted with love and admiration for the bravery needed to press on despite it all.