{"id":1049071,"date":"2026-09-07T15:37:18","date_gmt":"2026-09-07T15:37:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1049071\/"},"modified":"2026-09-07T15:37:18","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T15:37:18","slug":"look-back-review-hirokazu-kore-edas-rich-dazzling-manga-adaptation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1049071\/","title":{"rendered":"Look Back Review: Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Rich & Dazzling Manga Adaptation"},"content":{"rendered":"

The magic trick of Kiyotaka Oshiyama\u2019s 53-minute anime film<\/a> \u201cLook Back<\/a>\u201d is how its brevity gives visceral dimension to the defining tension of its story: That between the time it takes to create something (in this case, a portfolio of one-shots<\/a>), and the time it takes to consume it. By contrast, the magic trick of Hirokazu Kore-eda\u2019s<\/a> 100-minute live-action \u201cLook Back<\/a>\u201d is that it somehow manages to accomplish the same thing despite running twice as long.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As slavishly faithful to Oshiyama\u2019s anime as Oshiyama\u2019s anime was to Tatsuki Fujimoto\u2019s original manga, Kore-eda\u2019s muted but affecting drama retells the bittersweet tale of two very different schoolgirls in western Japan who are bonded together by their shared love of comics. The popular and boisterous Fujino (expressively played through her tweenage years by Furi Nanase) is famous among her classmates for the yonkoma cartoons that she draws for the school newspaper, and carried by the unique self-confidence that comes from discovering your purpose in life at such a young age. Alas, Fujino\u2019s entire worldview is rattled off its axis when she\u2019s in fourth grade \u2014 when a severely anxious local shut-in named Kyomoto begins to submit yonkoma of her own as a tentative way of engaging with the world beyond her bedroom. The recluse\u2019s work naturally lacks the finger-on-the-pulse wit of Fujino\u2019s strips, but it compensates for that with the careful attention of its linework and background detail. A heated rivalry is born.<\/p>\n

\"Rooney<\/a> \"You<\/a> <\/p>\n

That rivalry eventually blossoms into a beautiful collaboration, as Fujino is tasked with delivering Kyomoto\u2019s diploma to the shut-in\u2019s seemingly abandoned house at the end of sixth grade (no version of this story makes any mention of her parents\u2019 whereabouts, but the director of \u201cNobody Knows\u201d can\u2019t help but charge this brief glimpse of Kyomoto\u2019s barren home life with a tacit sense of tragedy), and, in what feels like a predestined twist of fate, inadvertently draws the recluse out of her room. By that point, Fujino\u2019s natural resentment towards Kyomoto\u2019s ability \u2014 and her obsessive failure to outdo it \u2014\u00a0has caused her to question her purpose, but it turns out that Kyomoto is Fujino\u2019s biggest fan, and so Fujino agrees to an ego\u2013saving creative partnership. Half a lifetime down the road, she will be haunted by that decision as if it just happened yesterday. But first: happiness.<\/p>\n

Their talents combined under the alias \u201cKyo Fujino,\u201d the girls hole up in Fujino\u2019s bedroom and busy themselves with becoming the most prolific young manga artists in all of Japan. The work they make together consumes the rest of their teenage years in a restless flurry of creative expression. It\u2019s\u00a0a slipstream of late nights, shared dreams, and debilitating hand cramps so transformative that Fujino and Kyomoto turn into other people right in front of our eyes, as the actors playing them are seamlessly recast with Natsuki Deguchi and Aju Makita (as clean a baton-pass between younger and older versions of the same characters as I\u2019ve ever seen before).\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The joy of creation is privileged above the quality of Kyo Fujino\u2019s work, but it\u2019s clear that a powerful new force in the manga world is beginning to emerge from their sleepy corner of the country, a place as far removed from the industry epicenter in Tokyo as Kyomoto used to be from the rest of the world. Of course, \u201cLook Back\u201d has never depicted the small city of Nikaho as the kind of nowheresville that you might expect to backdrop a Cinderella story about a pair of backwater artists who try to make a name for themselves; Fujimoto himself grew up in that semi-rural idyll, and its hyper-expressive landscapes are key to the natural beauty of his work.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While Kore-eda\u2019s films are often tendered with a limpid beauty, his subtle visual style is always strictly in service to his humanism, and there was reason to be concerned that his \u201cLook Back\u201d might fall short of the impossibly lush nostalgia that both the manga and its anime adaptation suffused into every frame. It doesn\u2019t. Maybe the closest thing I\u2019ve seen to the likes of a live-action Makoto Shinkai movie, Kore-eda\u2019s drama \u2014\u00a0shot across an entire calendar year, so as to capture the natural dynamism of the Nikaho weather \u2014\u00a0is an intoxicating mosaic of emerald green fields, periwinkle winter sunsets, and snow so white that one shot of Fujino and Kyomoto trudging uphill makes it appear as if they\u2019re walking across a blank sheet of paper. Virtually every scene during the first half of the film takes place in a different season than the one before it, but Senzo Ueno\u2019s sumptuously high-contrast cinematography smoothes them all into the unbroken flow of a lucid memory. The color scheme is magical enough to reflect the specialness of Fujino and Kyomoto\u2019s time together, but also grounded enough to preserve the material reality of what that time required of them.<\/p>\n

And time, ultimately, is what \u201cLook Back\u201d has always been about in any and all of its forms. The time it takes Fujino to scratch out a crudely drawn yonkoma vs. the time it takes Kyomoto to illustrate one of her own. The hundreds upon thousands of hours it takes for the girls to create a shared portfolio of work they can sell to the big magazines in Tokyo vs. the few short minutes it takes for them to sell a manga executive on their talent. The years it takes to forge the kind of friendship that most people will never be lucky enough to find in one lifetime vs. the seconds it takes to rip it apart.<\/p>\n

Previous incarnations of this story, specifically Oshiyama\u2019s anime, have weaponized their concision to emphasize how fast that time goes by, even when every sleepless night of work the girls spend together feels like it will never end.\u00a0Kyomoto maintains a quiet love for the process, but all of the tedious pencil-work and shading drives Fujino insane; I felt my entire body relax when she upgrades to a digital tablet during the movie\u2019s second half. Why draw if it\u2019s not fun?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"\u2018Look Back\u2019<\/p>\n

Kore-eda\u2019s \u201cLook Back\u201d doubles the time required to cover the same events, a lengthening owed more to the rhythm of familiar scenes rather than the introduction of new ones. The slower pace is an inevitable byproduct of the pivot from animation to live-action, as the two forms naturally operate at different speeds, and Kore-eda \u2014\u00a0whose movies have never been accused of being too fast \u2014\u00a0refuses to fight against that. Recognizing, perhaps, how this feather-light Bildungsroman automatically forfeits a key part of its power by undoing the meta-textual overlap between the girls\u2019 chosen medium and the one used to bring their story to life, Kore-eda focuses on what he might be able to get in return.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Time is his best answer. By stretching the property\u2019s thin plot further than anyone has in the past, and creating a palpable incongruity between the gentle flow of one scene to the next and the tilt-a-whirl speed at which the seasons tick by in the background, Kore-eda endows his \u201cLook Back\u201d with a temporal vertigo all its own. Where the anime careened forward like a runaway train, this much smoother adaptation speeds through time like a Shinkanesen moving so fast that it hardly feels like it\u2019s moving at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In addition to a number of lovely grace notes (e.g. the girls attend a theatrical showing of Murnau\u2019s \u201cNosferatu,\u201d a match-cut transposing the movie screen onto the window of the train they ride home when it\u2019s over), that flattening effect allows the out-of-nowhere twist that bisects every version of this story to hit with an even more devastating and inexplicable numbness than it did before. Aided immensely by the fleshed-out feeling of his cast\u2019s nuanced performances (another major advantage that live-action brings to the table in this instance), and also by a lovely Yuta Bandoh score that\u2019s measured where the music in the anime was more in your face, Kore-eda\u2019s film is able to sit with the film\u2019s defining tragedy with a patience that breeds a different feeling than I\u2019ve gotten from \u201cLook Back\u201d before.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It goes without saying that Kore-eda adheres to the M\u00f6bius strip-like structure of the story\u2019s emotional climax, which loops through holes in space and time on its roundabout journey back to the present. But where the anime rendered that reverie as the answer to a question (\u201cWhy do you draw, Fujino?\u201d), the more abstruse tonality of Kore-eda\u2019s version endows the same events with a less settled energy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Many of the shots are identical to how they\u2019ve been presented in previous versions, but here they don\u2019t feel like the answer to Kyomoto\u2019s question so much as they do a more urgent and galvanizing way of framing it in Fujino\u2019s mind. The wistful melancholy remains, but now it\u2019s bolstered by a new sense of resolve, so that every panel Fujino goes on to create won\u2019t just be tenderized by her teenage memories, but also determined to reward the time she invested in them. Lord knows that Kore-eda could have made this movie into a tear-jerker<\/a> if he wanted to, but, as his gently stirring adaptation makes clear, \u201cLook Back\u201d is more than just a tragedy \u2014\u00a0it\u2019s also a call to action. It\u2019s an invitation to create and savor those beautiful yesterdays while you still have the chance, because tomorrow will be here before you know it, if it even comes at all.<\/p>\n

Grade: B+<\/p>\n

\u201cLook Back\u201d premiered at the 2026 Venice<\/a> Film Festival. GKIDS will release it in theaters later this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The magic trick of Kiyotaka Oshiyama\u2019s 53-minute anime film \u201cLook Back\u201d is how its brevity gives visceral dimension…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1049072,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[28],"tags":[171,1020,420072,53,11853,67,132,68,9176],"class_list":["post-1049071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-look-back","tag-movies","tag-reviews","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us","tag-venice"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117230507769989896","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1049071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049071\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1049072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1049071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1049071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1049071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}