Stunning Anime Look Back Appreciates the Work of Art

Look Back, the 2021 manga by Chainsaw Man mangaka Tatsuki Fujimoto, follows the coming-of-age of fourth grader Fujino as she discovers and asserts her desire to draw manga. Her story is shaped by an unexpected rival-turned-accomplice Kyomoto, a truant who takes up the pencil after reading Fujino’s school newspaper comics, yet quickly outpaces the drawing skills of her hero.

It’s evident just in its protagonist and deuteragonist’s names that each is a stand-in for Fujimoto. Each girl represents different philosophies of art, different sides of the mangaka, different ways to live. Fujino publishes consistently, always has a story to tell, motivated by audience reception. Kyomoto is reclusive, her manga showing obsessive detail but lacking any story to connect with audiences on an emotional level. 

Together they become a prodigal duo submitting work through middle and high school until, finally, they’re given a serialization—one Kyomoto can’t accept. She goes to art school instead to become a better artist and a better person all on her own. She’s always looked up to Fujino, but Fujino has always looked back. She goes to art school while Fujino moves to the city and makes it big.

Look Back is a celebration of all that is drawn. Its opening scene finds Fujino (Yuumi Kawai) sitting over her desk drawing her four-panel manga for the school newspaper. We watch her expressions, reflected in a mirror moving in and out of frame. Squinting. Contemplating. Her arms shuffle to find an eraser. She shifts her weight, leans in. Many of Fujino’s own manga appear here animated—one in an extended, fully colored and voice-acted sequence that shifts art styles entirely.

Brought to animation by industry veteran Kiyotaka Oshiyama’s Studio Durian—a super group of MAPPA, Khara, Science SARU, Production I.G and Ghibli animators—Look Back enters the pantheon as one of the great works about art. It’s not allegorical like The Boy and the Heron (its closest contemporary in animation and theme), but is rather a film that sits in the work of art.

While there is an understated yet undeniable craftsmanship in Fujimoto’s manga about making manga, movement elevates Look Back. Color (Maya Kusumoto) and sound (Eriko Kimura) carry powerful tonal and temporal shifts across the film’s 58-minute runtime, while haruka nakamura delivers a nostalgic score of muted piano and soprano strings that captures dissatisfaction and loss. Oshiyama himself takes the credits of writer, director, storyboarder, character designer, animation director and key animator.

Oshiyama introduces surreal visuals that feel like they were missing from this story all along, while the film even adopts manga panels to portray memories as flashbacks. The most visually striking moments in Look Back are its hand-drawn tracking shots, while what 3D CGI is used is incorporated judiciously. An almost magical quality is imbued in the film as it lacks distinguishable animation in-betweens—everything retains even the rough sketch lines of hand-drawn key animation that is most wondrous in the motion of bodies and the folds of clothes. Other subtleties, like the translucence of paper held up to light and eraser shavings covering a desk, feel downright indulgent. And Oshiyama doesn’t shy away from drawing more explicit connections between the original author and his characters, much weightier than simple Easter eggs, given the obvious stand-ins. The last art we see Kyomoto (Mizuki Yoshida) work on, heartbreakingly, is a painting of the vault Denji keeps locked in Chainsaw Man.

But beyond the technical craft, what makes Look Back so appropriate as an animated film is its relationship to time. Time must pass for us too when Fujino draws at night, at school, at the park, when she runs in the rain, sobs in an empty bedroom; and Oshiyama lingers. Look Back guides our attention to something less romantic than the ideals of the craft. It’s work. And all the animation is itself more work. To make audiences sit with Fujino as she draws, how many hours did that take?

The work of Oshiyama and Durian is a prescient rejoinder to the current strain of reactionary discourse against art. It’s not (just) the fascism of Miyazaki’s childhood that decried modern art and prescribed beauty; late capitalism is dismantling art as a human expression, now codified by generative AI. Look Back says art like itself is not made despite the difficulties—of skill, yes, but mostly of time—it’s made because that is how we want to live our lives.

It is not the final image the artist lives with. In Look Back, it’s the days the two spend together. At desks, on the floors, drawing a single panel—this is how Fujino remembers Kyomoto. Their time together appears in their work: running hand-in-hand on the beach at golden hour, chasing one another through the woods on a summer’s day, inspecting a moth on the window, a trip to the aquarium. Drawing, again and again. For all the time spent working, they spend so much of it living. Until Kyomoto lives no longer.

Look Back was published just a day after the second anniversary of the 2019 Kyoto Animation arson attack, where 36 animators—mostly women, some as young as 21—were murdered while working at the acclaimed studio. The man who murders Kyomoto while she’s at school shares an ostensible motive with that arsonist.

But Look Back is not a tribute story. Rather, the invocation of the murder is an exigence that imbues Fujimoto’s own search for meaning in all his time spent creating art with an existential significance. Renowned for his reach to Gen Z and young millennials, Fujimoto’s works contain a familiar nihilism for a generation trying to fit in what life they can in the face of climate collapse, cost of living crises and resurgent fascism. Within this, his work looks at itself, addressing the futility of making art in this moment.

If Fujino didn’t draw, if she studied something more practical, maybe she could have saved Kyomoto. It’s her last fantasy and a great trick of both the manga and anime. The film shifts perspectives to Kyomoto on the day she meets Fujino, except this time they do not. Without Kyomoto, Fujino never finds a reason to keep drawing. Without Fujino, Kyomoto still pursues her craft, still goes to art school, is still attacked. And this time, she is saved—by a woman who started going to karate classes with her sister in middle school and runs a dojo nearby.

Fujino kicks Kyomoto’s murderer with all the style of a shonen hero. And when Kyomoto goes home, she draws a comic about it—the kind that Fujino used to draw for the school newspaper. For a moment the women exist in each of these timelines, separated once again by Kyomoto’s bedroom door. A breeze carries the manga strip across the threshold.

Fujino goes back to her office and hangs Kyomoto’s final manga, “Look Back,” above her desk. She finally looks up to Kyomoto. As she continues to draw, Look Back’s ending recontextualizes the solitude of Fujino’s desk. Kyomoto lives on in both her and Fujino’s art, in those last four panels and in the shonen manga that Fujino publishes under their old eponym.

Look Back is a requiem for art lost to violence, to circumstance, to conformity. It is also an argument to create. It pleads with us to see the work–in the folds of clothes, reflected in eyes, in its own credits. Look Back is not the platonic animated form of The Boy and the Heron, which felt like inevitable creation. Look Back is the labor of the Tower of Babylon that reaches the heavens and, in Ted Chiang’s story, breaches the reservoir, revealing the shape of the world. Their toil could not reveal any more than they knew, but rather simply allow them to glimpse at how ingeniously the world had been constructed. Few climb the tower with empty hands.

Director: Kiyotaka Oshiyama
Writer: Kiyotaka Oshiyama
Starring: Yumi Kawai, Mizuki Yoshida
Release Date: June 28, 2024 (Japan)

Autumn Wright is a critic of games and animation. Find their latest writing at @TheAutumnWright.