Top 15 Movies of 2024: No. 6 - Look Back

6. Look Back, dir.  Kiyotaka Oshiyama

Look Back is the shortest movie on the list. At only about fifty-eight minutes, Look Back is barely feature-length, and that depends whether you go with the Academy's definition or SAG's. For most of history, a major motion picture has always been at least eighty minutes long, and in my lifetime, they've only been getting longer. And here's a question is: why eight minutes? Why ninety? Why two hours? On what is any of this based? Look Back is an adaptation of a Tatsuki Fujimoto's one-shot manga, itself only 144 pages long. I've clocked this, the manga takes about forty minutes to read at a leisurely pace. So this adaptation, which is very close to manga, basically animating every panel, should match that. Efficiency is something nobody seems to care about to anymore - most streaming TV shows now are just overlong movies and would have been better at two hours. (And I'm a writer who has always failed at getting anything done with concision - look at this bloated paragraph!) If Look Back can achieve everything it wants to achieve in roughly a lunch break, that should be celebrated. That's courageous.

I already talked about Past Lives once in this series when I retroactively made it my Favorite Movie of 2023... as reconsidered in 2025. One of the powerful things about that movie is this question of choices and the infinite deaths you suffer across your life. As possibilities shrink, and potential yous dry up you're left with only the You That You Are. Look Back is not about a mid-life crisis, rather it is two young girls, who dedicate their youth to the pursuit of their art, this being manga. Early on, Fujino (Yuumi Kawai) is satisfied with the praise her talent for silly drawings achieve. However, she is horrified when confronted with real seasoned craft in the form of a rival, Kyomoto (Mizuki Yoshida)'s background drawings, which are near professional-quality. Fujino right here makes a key life decision: she can double-down and hone her skills, sacrificing all else socially to master the art of comics, or she can live a more normal life. The mangaka lifestyle is especially grueling. Eiichiro Oda, creator of One Piece, claimed to have worked twenty-one hour days, seven days a week, which I have to believe is an exaggeration but still points to a disturbing workaholic lifestyle. Look Back is not glorifying this by any means, it recognizes the toll this takes on a person, even one so long and passionate. 

Still there gives us two universes, one where Fujino grows to be a major success with a beloved manga series, and another where she didn't. Fujino does not even begin to reflect on the course of her until a terrible tragedy puts everything into a new focus.

There's a contraction at play in making art. Doing this has to be a social activity. I write these things then run around with my little scribbles outstretched, hoping somebody reads it. But also, it is isolating. Even doing these reviews requires many hours of sitting alone in front of a computer, considering a sentence, considering a joke, doubting oneself as to whether or not any of this is even worth doing at all. One does not reach out into the ether of the higher levels of the universe to build a thing, you just actually do it, typing one word at a time. Or drawing one line at a time. Fujino and Kyomoto have each other as a great partnership. Look Back is one of the best romances of 2024 while also being entirely asexual. Fujino and Kyomoto were not born good at this craft, it took hundreds of hours and stacks upon stacks of sketchbooks to get to a masterful level. But eventually they go their separate paths, and we're left with Fujino alone in her studio, working in total quiet. There is a huge window of the world outside, which she is not experiencing. Millions might love what she does, she might connect with them through the manga, but they're not here with her. We end this movie on a long shot of Fujino sitting there, back to the camera, working.

I wanted to draw manga at one point in my life. I have middle school and high school and college notebooks full of sketches and ideas, which will probably never be realized. It is something I just did not pursue. Cell phones and social media ate up the little moments in the day I found for doodling. Writing came more easily, and even there I  have a million disappointments in projects I never finished in this medium as well. There are times I imagine High School Me and whether he'd even recognize Current Me. I wonder if he'd like any of this writing or if this would just bore him because I didn't put in enough curse words.

Tatsuki Fujimoto clearly has a lot of himself wrapped into Look Back. There's an extended reference to the Kyoto Animation arson attack, one of the worst tragedies in modern Japanese history. I can imagine both young women in this manga and film represent sides of himself, maybe parts of the process he's felt he's lost along the way. They're the hot young passion that gets burnt away when sticking to deadlines and grinding out volume after volume of Chainsaw Man. It's a kind of journey to rediscover what really drove him to do this. We might see that moment here. There's a scene set in the rain where Fujino, having just lied to Kyomoto about a new project, is so overpowered by the desire to create she cannot contain herself, she has to dance along the path, finally overcome, she takes off running home, where he can start drawing her next work. Actually doing the thing is work, dull work. But the moment of inspiration, that's magical. You need to cherish that to keep going.