‘Look Back’ Review: The Road Not Taken

Tatsuki Fujimoto, creator of popular manga series like Chainsaw Man and Fire Punch, always has a cinematic feel to his work. Be it the refrain of films and filmmaking in Goodbye Eri and the aforementioned manga to his way of paneling. His work is made for the screen.

Produced by Studio Durian and directed by Kiyotaka Oshiyama, Look Back chronicles the story of two girls, Fujino and Kyomoto, the trials and tribulations of fragile friendship, the struggles that one faces and what it means to be an artist.

Fujino is a precocious elementary school student. She has a talent for coming up with witty yonkoma (four-panel comics) that are published in her school newspaper. Thriving on praise, she’s on top of the world. Until it all comes crashing down when truant, reclusive Kyomoto also starts contributing yonkoma for the newspaper. While Fujino may excel at delivering the punchline, seeing Kyomoto’s detailed art style side by side to her cartoons, she feels a real punch in the gut. Soon Kyomoto’s manga is all anyone talks about. Despite not being physically present, she haunts Fujino’s waking moments. No matter how hard she tries, she can’t catch up. Fujino gives up.

Her chance meeting with the reclusive Kyomoto — while going to deliver the latter’s graduation diploma to her home — radically changes the trajectory of both their lives. Teaming up, they go on to create several successful one-shot manga for magazines even before graduating high school.

Both are diametrical opposites in personality and in their approach to art. Fujino is athletic, extroverted an confident. What she lacks in artistic technique, she makes up with the content and characters. If people don’t praise your art, what’s the point, is her belief. Kyomoto is on the other hand is a shut-in, introverted, reserved; people scare her. Her art style is neat, realistic and backgrounds are her forte. Neither approach is wrong, but to make it as a mangaka or an artist, both are necessary. Fujino needs Kyomoto as much as Kyomoto needs Fujino.

The pen name under which the girls publish manga is Kyo Fujino. Fujino and Kyomoto in a way are two sides of the same coin. The coin in question being Fujimoto himself. While not entirely autobiographical, Fujimoto has drawn inspiration from his own life and the world around him. The works the girls create are similar to his earlier one-shots. Fujino’s serialized Shark Kick shares visual similarities with Chainsaw Man. The volume covers of Shark Kick, you will notice, are modified Chainsaw Man covers!

When Fujino’s manga is about to get serialized, Kyomoto with her newfound confidence, decides to step out into the real world and declares that she wants to go to art school to improve her technique. This decision rings like a shot in the dark for Fujino; bitter, she nevertheless lets Kyomoto go.

Filmmaker Oshiyama, known for Space Dandy (2014) and Flip Flappers (2016), has also worked on Studio Ghibli’s The Wind Rises (2013) and The Boy and the Heron (2023) and this shows. It is in the clear blue sky and vivid greens of the countryside as Fujino walks home, in the dark cloudy rain and the puddles she splashes in, the warmth of the shinkansen as the girls make their way home from a day out in the city. Fujimoto’s aesthetic is wild, messy, gritty and dynamic, a lot like Fujino’s. Oshiyama, who animated a significant portion of Look Back himself, has managed to capture the essence of Fujimoto and turned it into a more delicate, soft and realistic image.

Haruka Nakamura’s calm soundtrack sets the tone for every moment in this film. There’s a lot of stillness in Look Back. The refrain of Fujino hunched over her desk frantically drawing, foot tapping in frustration; the comfortable quiet that settles in between Fujino and Kyomoto as they work together in tandem and the loud silence that makes its presence felt only when you’re alone. Words punctuate the silence, when necessary, but it is in the quiet that the beauty of Look Back lies.

Fujimoto has woven into Look Back the real-life incident of the Kyoto Animation Studio arson attack that occurred in 2019. KyoAni’s Studio 1 (in Kyoto) was attacked by a man who believed that the studio plagiarized his ideas in a lot of anime they had created. While his accusations and evidence didn’t really hold much water, 36 people paid for it dearly with their lives. A lot of the key animation frames and materials were forever lost in the fire. It goes to show the fragility of art and the creator.

The manga and animation industry in Japan is a harsh environment. Weekly deadlines, public opinion, pressure from the publishers all contribute to a killing schedule and mindset. Promising mangakas mostly start their careers early on in their late teenage years. The prospect of burnout hangs imminently like a dagger to their heads.

In both the manga and the film, a lot of the frames focus on Fujino drawing. As dawn turns to dusk, months turn to years, her position remains the same. Perhaps, you think, in the beginning she seems more enthused, her posture confident, better as she holds the pen between her fingers expertly creating yonkoma. As she grows, she hunches more, drawn inwards, guarded, tired as she erases and redraws her serialized manga digitally. It is almost monastic. A mangaka’s world, you think, is lonely. Ironic considering the characters and the worlds they create.

Is it truly a work of Fujimoto if the characters don’t suffer? Kyomoto, ends up being victim to a freak killing spree at her university. A disgruntled artist, believing his work to be plagiarized by a student at the university indiscriminately takes a pickaxe to the nearest students. Unfortunately, one of those students was Kyomoto.

The meaning of the title really comes into play when Fujino visits Kyomoto’s house after the funeral. Guilt weighs down on her like an anchor as she is lost in a sea of grief. When she finds the yonkoma that had set off the chain of events, she rips it in a fit of anger. The scraps find a place on the other side of that closed door where Kyomoto would have been.

Two roads diverged in a wood, what happens if Fujino took the one she didn’t travel by?

The theme of dichotomy is present throughout the film between Fujino and Kyomoto. This even extends to their fates. In another life, Fujino looks back to what would have happened if she hadn’t met Kyomoto that fateful day. Would she have survived? Would they have been friends? Would they still draw together? When you look back at life, the happiness, the regret, would you still find yourself winding up where you’re supposed to be, if you do things differently?