REVIEW: ‘Look Back’ Captures The Depth of Connecting With Another Person

While Tatsuki Fujimoto is most well-known for Chainsaw Man, his one-shot Look Back offers a different kind of emotional story, one grounded in reality but still couched in enough sci-fi to use the genre to hit an emotional resonance with readers. Created, written, and illustrated by Fujimoto, this one-shot is published and localized in English by VIZ Media. Now, the Look Back anime is a reality. Animated by Studio Durian, and directed and written for the screen by Kiyotaka Oshiyama, the film’s dreamlike walkthrough of love, loss, and the remorseful grief that breeds is accompanied by a score from Haruka Nakamura.

The overly confident Fujino and the shut-in Kyomoto couldn’t be more different, but a love of drawing manga brings these two small-town girls together. When Kyomoto sees Fujino’s manga in the school paper, she’s hurt. It’s beautiful art, but Fujino is younger than her, which causes inferiority to grow inside Kyomoto. How come she can’t draw like that? Putting immense pressure on herself, Kyomoto begins to dedicate every piece of her time to drawing manga, becoming a shut-in. When Fujino comes over one day to drop off something from school, she pulls Kyomoto out of her room with a comic strip.

What follows is a friendship and dedication to creating manga that captures the beauty of friendship and creating together. But when tragedy strikes, the girls will have to look back on their lives and into the future. It’s not always the case that an animated adaptation of written work makes itself become something more. But Studio Durian’s Look Back adds an emotional resonance and romance that leaps from the screen. While I cried when reading Fujimoto’s original manga, I felt myself weeping even more while watching the Look Back anime.

The reason is simple. In Look Back, Fujimoto created a story that thrived on visual language instead of dialogue. In the anime, the same is done. Only in an animated medium does the story take on a new life and new layers that add depth to the smallest of moments shared between Fujino and Kyomoto. Capturing Fujimoto’s signature full-page moments, Studio Durian also takes the time to deepen the worlds we see.

Those worlds are each girl’s room—their shelves, their desks, and even how they sit. The score and the small movements of wind that carry their connection through time and space feel gargantuan even within the small scale of the film. From the four-panel comics being animated to the main story itself, the animation captures whimsy, melancholy, and romance. It’s a unique atmosphere that almost defies explanation, much like Fujimoto’s manga.

We see them grow more comfortable over time, admire each other over time, and ultimately share a deep intimacy. That intimacy can be read as platonic or romantic, depending on how you view the film. The romantic air and landscapes lend credence to the latter. However you read it, the intimacy remains. This means the pain runs deep when Fujino and Kyomoto separate and ultimately have to reckon with losing each other forever.

At only 58 minutes, Look Back is an anime film that offers emotion over everything. In that small runtime, Studio Durian pulls in its audience, makes us care deeply for the lead girls turned women, and asks us to think like Fujino does. We are asked to think about the way one choice can shape a life. How can it give meaning, or how can we force ourselves to believe it has taken it away? In under an hour, Studio Durian has given audiences a quintessential look at regret and what it looks like to move forward while still looking back.

Look Back tackles sentiments of inferiority, depression, and friendship. It also looks at grief and surviving after it in a nuanced way that punches beyond its 58-minute run time. We are looking into a small window of Fujino and Kyomoto’s lives, but through it, we’re experiencing the depth that one relationship can hold and the transformative power it can have on our lives.

Look Back screened as a part of Japan Cuts 2024.