The last line spoken in Look Back, an anime adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s one shot manga of the same name, is, “Why do you draw, Fujino?” This beautiful, heartfelt movie is the answer to its own question.
Tatsuki Fujimoto is perhaps better known for his best selling series Chainsaw Man, which combines stylish action with sincere character studies of its various offbeat characters. Look Back, which Fujimoto released during a Chainsaw Man hiatus, leans more on the latter than the former. It’s the story of Fujino, an elementary school student who prides herself on being good at drawing manga. She’s considered the best artist in class until Kyomoto, a student who doesn’t come to school due to social anxiety, requests a comics slot in the school newspaper and Fujino learns that this other girl is a much better artist than she. This kickstarts both Fujino and Kyomoto’s lifelong obsession with art, drawing and manga—as well as a life changing friendship between the two of them.
I saw the anime adaptation of Look Back in theaters this weekend—the movie has a limited engagement in theaters before coming to Amazon Prime on November 7. I think everyone should see this movie in any way they can, but it’s absolutely gorgeous in theaters. In particular, the sequence of Fujino skipping home triumphantly in the rain when she realizes that Kyomoto is an admirer of hers, and not a rival, is my favorite shot from any movie I’ve seen this year. It is a movie that compels the viewer to lose themselves in every frame, even in the most mundane sequences. A shot that Look Back returns to over and over again is Fujino hunched over her desk, drawing for hours on end, alone but engrossed in what she’s creating.
It was hard not to see myself in Fujino and Kyomoto—I was also a lonely child that devoted my life to my chosen art form (writing). Like Fujino, I’ve grown into an adult whose livelihood revolves around a trade that I started doing for fun as a child. Look Back manages to untangle this complicated relationship to art both in its content, and how it’s been adapted. In an interview after the screening, director Kiyotaka Oshiyama said he drew large portions of the movie himself, on top of writing the screenplay and doing the character designs. At a screening of the film in Japan he said he had been drawing up until noon that very day.
The human labor that goes into art is seemingly on Oshiyama’s mind—in the same post-screening interview, he mentioned that he tried hard to retain the evidence that human beings worked on this film, and said that right now, creative industries are under threat from technology like generative AI. The lush, naturalistic animation of Look Back is a testament not just to Oshiyama’s dedication to his craft, but also the answer to the question that Kyomoto asks Fujino at the end of the film.
Why does Fujino draw? Why does anyone make art at all? As Fujino says, drawing manga is a pain—your back hurts, you work all day and still have more to do, and the whole process is a hassle. But drawing is what allowed Fujino to reach another person, to change their life and be changed by them. So she keeps drawing.
