Based on the one-shot manga by Tatsuki Fujimoto, Look Back follows Fujino and Kyomoto through their unexpected relationship formed by a shared love for art. Fujino is a young artist highly motivated to showcase her comic sensibilities in her school’s newspaper with weekly panels who is shocked to see truant student Kyomoto’s contrasting drawings published next to hers. The girls become involved as Kyomoto’s love for Fuijno’s comics bridge a gap of jealousy into one of collaboration. The movie is a brisk 58 minutes long and never dull for a second as Kiyotaka Oshiyama’s direction enables the story to exercise a well-paced blend of stillness and movement. 

What makes Look Back an ultimately transcendent emotional gut-punch is that the story is entirely on the weight of the characters' livelihoods and the production of their art. This is not inherently a movie about manga, but a movie about the physical production of art and how such labor of artistic practice is a form of mutual care. There is constant emphasis on slouched backs on top of desks, hands clutching drawing utensils, and the material decoration of the setting for each of the girl’s rooms. An amalgamation of their familiar practices are then shown as the girls are working together, and the routine of the labor is not lessened but rather one part of a space now opened to each other's physical wellness (sleep in particular feels greatly comforting to see.) Fujino and Kyomoto separately joke about death in comics they draw, and for such young artists there’s a true comedic energy to deprecation that feels both far removed from their lives and yet subtlety in tune with their never-ending work ethic. The dark jokes are greater than a punchline or naivete though; they come from one another’s desire to assume the other. The satisfaction of amusement is felt greatly in the movie when it is at its most personal exchanges between Fujino and Kyomoto.

The girls act upon their goals to produce manga by rigorous dedication to their craft. They become prolific before they are even adults; the focal interest and detail brought into depicting the youth in Fujino and Kyomoto is done incredibly well by Oshimaya and Fujimoto. The artists have entered an industry of capital and business. The movie has a delicately open conversation through its leads regarding the financial and economic framework of publishing. The work ethic is likely exhausting, something their bodies are seen to have been going through already on a self-motivated regimine, and to produce work is to be paid to keep doing it once it’s your job. Fujino is bound to this trajectory in many ways: you work endlessly to prove yourself, you move out of the countryside to the city, you write for a greater public audience with a manga serialized in a weekly magazine. Kyomoto has different plans in mind with where she wants to take her practice when given the opportunity to continue a career in drawing manga.

Their collaboration faces a rift that becomes an abstract dilemma of Fujino’s mental struggle to divorce her perceived responsibility from her actions of love for Kyomoto. For a movie that is under an hour long, Look Back finds a way to compact a truly sympathetic arrangement of scenes that focus on the hardships of what a person can and can’t do to care for one another. VAs Yuumi Kawai and Mizuki Yoshida are expressive and subtle in their performances. They are able to act amongst one another in a scene with playful conversation, and equally give their characters a felt desire to speak to the other when alone. Fujino and Kyomoto have incredibly isolated lives, but they grant each other time. As the movie nears its ending, it’s most powerful assertions lie in the fact that whether literal or figurative, they’ve granted each other something that cannot be given back.

Look Back is now playing in limited theatrical release via GKIDS 

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