LOOK BACK

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I haven’t cried so much within one hour for a long time. Look Back was, in many ways, a truly special experience.

#My theater experience

Wanted to touch on that briefly - My theater experience was very good. They did show additional staff interviews at the end which were great and very insightful. That should be a staple for movies in my opinion, I love hearing the creators talk about why they decided to make a movie this way and what the intention behind various aspects of a work is. The whole theater also was relatively quiet which helped with the immersion. I also liked that we all clapped together at the end, I thought I would be the only one to do it but it was nice to see that there is widespread appreciation for a work like this.

#Love Letter to Art and Expression

When I watched Look Back, I couldn’t help but cry not only because it’s an emotional story, but also because it’s portrayed in a way that felt like it just oozed love for the art of animation itself. The characters are drawn in a loose fashion that allows a lot of expression and human nuances in their behavior, the animation is constantly on the move, not caring much about being polished but giving life to what we see on the screen. In the staff interview after the movie the director Kiyotaka Oshiyama also went into how they tried to not polish and clean up the drawings too much to show the human element in them, such as sketches, intention behind lines, and so on, and it shows. The visuals themselves seem to be very much “alive”, and I honestly don’t know if I can describe it better than that and it might only make sense when you see the movie for yourself. This sentiment of being “alive” also carried over in other departments, with the voice acting being not too shy to be more natural than what you normally see in anime and the soundtrack helped to enhance the immersion as well with a lot of bittersweet piano melodies that helped to take in the full picture. I also love the color design in the movie, it reminds me in a very good way of Western comics such as “On a Sunbeam”.

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#Looking back

The movie also resonated with me personally due to me currently trying to get better at animating and having spent a good chunk of my life doing that and drawing in general. There are a lot of moments that are simply very relatable, such as Fujino getting too arrogant because of the praise of her classmates, or celebrating in the rain with weird body movements after giving Kyomoto an autograph. The movie also captures the framing of the original work by only showing Fujino’s back when she draws, and how she continuously springs forward with her ambitions without giving herself time to breathe and properly “look back”. It was only when Kyomoto died and she saw Kyomoto’s room, that she realized that she drew all the time because she loved seeing Kyomoto reading her manga. It’s a message especially powerful if you can resonate with the struggle of drawing or animating. It can be not very fun at times, and you constantly feel down because you can’t help but compare yourselves to others who do much better than you do. At times you feel like giving up, but at other times, you just keep drawing. But at the end of the day, there needs to be some reason to keep drawing, even if it’s trivial. The movie not only conveys this idea really well but it felt like it also asked me as a viewer to “look back”. While I am still in the process of doing so, I can say that I started seriously considering animation after someone here on Anilist told me to try - so yeah, as I said, it can be a trivial reason.

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#Conclusion
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In the end of the day, “Look Back” truly was beyond what I ever could’ve hoped. The director also asked for his movie to be watched again in a few years with the technological breakthroughs happening at the moment, so we can once again “look back”. And I think it will be very interesting to do so because this movie truly celebrates the art made by humans. There is intention, emotion, and purpose behind what artists do which can’t be replicated by an AI that only can copy learned patterns. Thank you Tatsuki Fujimoto for creating this wonderful story and thank you Kiyotaka Oshiyama for a wonderful adaptation of a wonderful story. I can’t wait to watch it again.

Thanks for reading and if you have any feedback for this review, feel free to leave it here.