Look Back (2024) Review: Two Girls, One Drawing Desk

Is Look Back worth watching?

Yes. Look Back packs more feeling into under an hour than most features manage in two, and it is one of the most honest films about the creative life that anime has produced. Kiyotaka Oshiyama’s adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s manga is beautifully drawn, alive to the loneliness and obsession of making art, and quietly devastating. The reservation is its compression: some shifts arrive so quickly that viewers may feel pulled along rather than led.

What is Look Back about?

Look Back begins in a Japanese elementary school, where Fujino is the class star. Outgoing and admired, she draws the funny four-panel comics in the class newspaper and enjoys the praise that comes with them. Then her teacher asks her to share the space with Kyomoto, a withdrawn student who never comes to school. Kyomoto’s drawings are startlingly accomplished, and Fujino, stung, sets out to beat her. What begins as jealousy slowly becomes something else as the two discover how much they share.

Yuumi Kawai voices Fujino and Mizuki Yoshida voices Kyomoto. Oshiyama wrote and directed this Japanese-language adaptation of Fujimoto’s one-shot manga, which runs 58 minutes. It opened in Japan in June 2024 and screened at Annecy the same month.

Animation that shows the hand behind it

Oshiyama keeps the pencil visible. The characters retain the energy of rough sketch lines, and the film seems to breathe with the same pressure as the drawings its heroines make. It is an intimate style, well suited to a story about two people who pour everything onto paper, and it gives even ordinary school corridors and bedrooms a warm, textured look.

The film’s most memorable sequences are its simplest. Long stretches show a girl hunched over a desk as the seasons pass outside the window, and the effect is almost hypnotic: this is what devotion to a craft actually looks like, hours of solitary work that no one else sees. In a brief, joyous moment of release, Fujino’s elation spills out into movement, a scene that captures the rush of being recognised by the one person whose opinion matters.

Haruka Nakamura’s gentle, piano-led score supports rather than directs, letting the silence of work do its job.

A friendship built on rivalry and need

Fujimoto is best known for the wild, violent Chainsaw Man, but Look Back shows his more reflective side, and the film honours that. Fujino and Kyomoto are drawn as opposites: one hungry for applause, the other terrified of the outside world. Each gives the other something she lacks, and the film treats their partnership with tenderness without pretending it is simple.

Kawai and Yoshida are both excellent. Kawai finds the insecurity inside Fujino’s bravado, and Yoshida gives Kyomoto a trembling, awestruck voice that makes her shyness feel vivid rather than cute.

The cost of such a short running time

At under an hour, Look Back moves fast. Years pass in cuts, and the story’s larger emotional turns, which deal with grief and regret, land with great force but little room to settle. Some viewers will find the brevity purifying; others may feel that the film skips past moments that deserved more time, particularly in the girls’ teenage years. It also leans heavily on emotional crescendo in its later stretch, a choice that will move most people and strike a few as insistent.

Who should watch Look Back?

It is essential for artists, writers and anyone who has devoted themselves to a creative practice, and a natural pick for anime fans who prefer drama to action. Its length makes it an easy evening watch, though it deserves full attention. It deals with loss and includes a brief, upsetting depiction of violence, so it suits teenagers and adults more than younger children.

If Look Back lands for you, try:

• Whisper of the Heart, a Studio Ghibli story about a young girl discovering her creative vocation.
• The Boy and the Heron, Hayao Miyazaki’s personal meditation on grief and imagination.
• Grave of the Fireflies, for another Japanese animated film unafraid to break your heart.

The verdict

Look Back is a small, precise film with a large heart: a tribute to the solitary labour of art and to the friendships that make it bearable. Its speed means some moments pass too quickly, but its images and its honesty stay with you long after the hour is up.

Rating: 4/5