Whenever Tatsuki Fujimoto comes up in conversation, there is a good section of the manga community that are not fans of the author of the popular manga series Chainsaw Man. Known for its crude humor and gore-tastic action, Chainsaw Man is more thoughtful than its haters give it credit for as if you take away the bloody surface, you have an ongoing coming-of-age narrative that is tragic, horrifying and even touching. If you still think Fujimoto is some one-trick pony, his one-shot manga Look Back and its anime adaptation would tell you otherwise.
Although Chainsaw Man has an unconventional Shonen protagonist in the shape of Denji, who is not defined by having a single goal that will drive him throughout an entire series, Look Back is all about youth and ambition.
The story centers on Ayumu Fujino (Yūmi Kawai), an elementary schooler with a talent for drawing manga, which she publishes in the school’s paper. However, she finds herself challenged by another student named Kyomoto (Mizuki Yoshida), who begins publishing her own manga alongside Fujino’s but demonstrates herself as the superior artist between the two. Eventually the girls meet and it turns out that Kyomoto is a shut-in who also happens to be a huge fan of Fujino’s work, and thus they decide to collaborate on drawing manga with the hopes of submitting their work to be published.
Only 58 minutes long, this is an incredibly faithful adaptation of Fujimoto’s story that wonderfully explores the relationship between these two girls who bond over their aspiration to become manga artists. As time goes by, that aspiration is what splits up their bond. While there are places where the material has been expanded, such as Fujino’s blackly-comic four-panel manga being wonderfully animated, it never strays off from what Fujimoto is saying from his own work.
From a character perspective, the story focuses more on Fujino, who is introduced as a shallow elementary schooler whose ego gets the better of her upon seeing Kyomoto’s detailed background art. As she determines to get better with her art, Fujino isolates from everyone else, lacking a social life. Throughout her journey, where she goes through the best and worst times, the story touches upon this question about why do we create art, whilst also serving as a meta commentary about what it means to a manga artist, which can be a lonely profession where you don’t have the best working conditions. Look Back never answers that question, at least verbally, but through her partnership with Kyomoto, Fujino may have found a positive reason to draw for a living.
Directed by Kiyotaka Oshiyama, who is also in charge of the screenplay and character designs, he and the staff of Studio Durian present a breathtaking hand-drawn presentation of Look Back’s melancholic world, whilst cinematically breaking out of Fujimoto’s tight paneling. Whilst the characters look exactly as do when Fujimoto draw them, the animation does a great job of visualizing Fujino and Kyomoto through their moments, from the latter being hunched back to reflect her shut-in state, to the former expressing more physically such as a cathartic run through the rain.
With montages that use the recurring image of Fujino’s back as she draws manga to visualize the passage of time, Look Back very much relies on its visual storytelling that is enhanced by Haruka Nakamura’s angelic score. With its brief running time, the film never attempts to make any big dramatic moment, even when the story reaches its tragic turning point, which is something that has been a recurring subject since the manga’s publication. Both Fujimoto’s story and this adaptation never discriminates, but this fictional tragedy – inspired by a real-life tragedy – will be upsetting for some viewers and may take against it, especially when it is juxtaposed with one of the film’s few flights of fantasy. For as daring as this intense sequence is, it feels right with what it means towards our two female protagonists.
Look Back arrives on Prime Video November 7.
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