“So why is it that you draw?” That’s the question that’s pondered at the end of the film and ultimately lies at the heart of Tatsuki Fujimoto‘s original one-shot manga. It’s a question that artists across just about any field have asked themselves at some point, and it is difficult to answer, if it can be answered at all. The struggle that comes with that question defines Look Back, and despite its short runtime, it manages to capture everything beautiful and ugly about that struggle to create a work that is nothing short of a masterpiece.
That story is told through the lens of a cocky schoolgirl named Fujino, who draws 4-panel manga strips for her school’s newspaper and enjoys all of the praise she receives from her classmates for her talent. However, her ego is shattered by a shut-in named Kyomoto, who turns out to be a much better artist than she is. Fujino considers giving up on manga until she discovers that Kyomoto is her biggest fan. This leads Kyomoto to become Fujino’s assistant, and the two of them continue to work together until Kyomoto attempts to strike out on her own and becomes the victim of a senseless tragedy.
It’s a compelling story (albeit pretty straightforward when compared to a lot of Fujimoto’s other works), but the real strength of Look Back is less in its narrative and more in its presentation. Specifically in how well director Kiyotaka Oshiyama and the Studio Durian staff convey the drive inherent to creating art. We spend a lot of time looking at Fujino’s back as she hunches over a desk, drawing non-stop and leaving piles of sketchbooks in her wake as she devotes all her time to improving. When Fujino first becomes jealous of Kyomoto’s art and nearly puts down her pen altogether, it is the shock of seeing how many more sketchbooks’ worth of art Kyomoto has drawn that gets Fujino to impulsively start drawing again. That mutual sense of drive brings Fujino and Kyomoto together and allows Fujino to pull Kyomoto out of her shell and into her orbit as they find joy in working together. It also ends up tearing them apart when Kyomoto’s desire to keep improving her art and be less emotionally dependent on Fujino for support causes them to break up and go down separate paths.
This all comes to a head when Kyomoto ends up being killed by a man who shouts accusations of plagiarism. This tragedy draws parallels to the animators who lost their lives as a result of the arson attack on Kyoto Animation in 2019. Kyomoto’s death causes Fujino to question why she started drawing, and she begins to feel that Kyomoto would still be alive if they never pursued a manga career together. However, we see through an imagined sequence that even if their lives had never intersected early on, they still would have crossed paths, as they would have inevitably pursued an art career anyway. Drawing is simply an inescapable part of who they are as people, but it’s also what continues to connect them. Even after they had parted ways, Fujino and her art continued to serve as a source of inspiration for Kyomoto. That’s why, despite this tragedy, Fujino can’t bring herself to give up on drawing, and while it’s a somber note for the film to end on, it still feels like nothing less than a celebration of what makes art so incredibly powerful.
That celebration has also extended into the look of the film itself. The film’s director, Kiyotaka Oshiyama, has talked in interviews about how he and his team at Studio Duran made it their mission to express their drive for drawing through this film, which shines through in the final product. The movie is gorgeous, and the animation does a great job of making the characters feel expressive as it captures everything from the subtle movements of Fujino’s hands as she’s sketching to her happy skipping through the fields when she learns that Kyomoto is her fan, making all of it look nothing less than incredible. The original manga one-shot had already felt like a film thanks to Fujimoto’s cinematic sense of paneling and layouts, and the team managed to translate all of that into the movie while adding plenty of their flourishes, such as depicting Fujino and Kyomoto’s 4-koma manga strips through a shift in animation style, that help to make the adaptation feel more distinct.
Equal praise has to be given to the musical score by haruka nakamura as its melancholic tones add a lot to the film’s sense of atmosphere, and its theme song, “Light Song” by Uraha, does an excellent job of ending the film on a hauntingly beautiful note. Even if you’ve already read the original one-shot, plenty here helps this adaptation stand on its own merits, and the team at Studio Durian has more than succeeded at conveying the soul of what made this story resonate with artists.
The film recently debuted on Amazon Prime with a new English dub courtesy of VSI Los Angeles, and it’s a good one. Patrick Seitz usually excels at directing dramas and manages to draw some strong performances out of Valerie Rose Lohman and Grace Lu as Fujino and Kyomoto, matching the film’s tone well. Between the two of them, I was the most impressed with Grace Lu‘s performance and how well she could convey Kyomoto’s awkwardness and social anxiety throughout all her interactions with Fujino, which helped a lot in drawing the viewer into their relationship. Having also listened to the Japanese audio during its limited theatrical run, I lean a little more towards Yūmi Kawai‘s version of Fujino, but Valerie Rose Lohman delivers a solid performance in her own right and does a strong enough job at carrying the emotional core of the film, that I don’t think you can go wrong with either language track. The closest thing to a criticism I can lob at the dub is that it features a few bits of slang during the elementary school segments that might be a point of contention. Still, it doesn’t do anything to distract or detract from the film, so even that’s mostly just nitpicking. In general, this is a film where the strongest performers are the animators rather than the actors.
Look Back is nothing less than a love letter to art and all the messiness that comes with it, and is easily one of the strongest films of the year, if not one of the best I’ve seen.
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