Look Back review – Kore-eda’s ode to friendship, manga and artistic success

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s sad and beautiful film is about friendship, about the ecstasy and burden of success and about what it means to have an artistic vocation, especially when that vocation is pursued collaboratively, with your best friend. It is adapted by Kore-eda from the standalone, or “one-shot”, online manga story of the same title by Tatsuki Fujimoto, which has in fact already had an anime movie adaptation.

Fujino, played by Furi Nanase as a 13-year-old and later by Natsuki Deguchi, is a dedicated would-be manga artist who dreams of being published and adapted for the movies. It is her personal and artistic destiny to come into contact, in her early teens, with fellow manga obsessive Kyomoto, who is played first by Rokka Okada and then as an adult by Aju Makita. Theirs is a kind of platonic but passionate love story.

Fujino begins the story as someone who is very pleased with herself. In school, she has became a virtual celebrity for her simple four-frame yonkoma manga strips in the class magazine. But then her homeroom teacher tells her that he is giving space to a regular manga from another girl, Kyomoto, who suffers from anxiety and never comes into school. Kyomoto’s work stuns Fujino. It seems to her (and all her classmates) to be patently better than hers. Her own work had been simplistically about the faces and the dialogue and the story; Kyomoto’s is more subtly about background ambience – the still life-type landscapes and scenes are far more accomplished.

Fujino feels like a Mozart who suddenly turned into a Salieri. She more or less abandons manga in that moment, morosely pursuing sports, in particular karate. When, at the end of term, her teacher asks her to drop off Kyomoto’s graduation certificate at her house – Kore-era playfully allows us to see that the teacher is trying to engineer a friendship between these two young people – Fujino is resentful and reluctant. She goes there intending brusquely to leave the item and go, but a chaotic mishap means they meet face to face and Kyomoto emotionally calls her “sensei” and says she is her biggest fan. Fujino joyfully resumes drawing and they become soulmates and partners, fusing into one manga creator, an ideal team, winning prizes and commissions. Fujino devises the foregrounded story and characters while Kyomoto’s considered artistry creates the deep emotional mood and context.

But just when they are on a roll, their careers at a staggering momentum that other, older, artists can only dream of … Kyomoto says she wants to quit and go to art college, to be a better artist, while she still has enough time, enough humility to learn. Fujino is furious and the break between them is more painful, more important, than any sundered love affair.

Kore-eda shows us the heartbreak that this leads to, and to an agonising “sliding doors” type reverie about how things could have been different, how Fujino could have redeemed herself as the lesser artist. Fujino wants to reach into the past and change things: and in a sense that is what artists do, especially those whose work is strongly personal or autobiographical. They look back, they retrace their steps to the wellspring of their inspiration, the source of their life’s meaning; they see the form and substance of experiences whose meaning they could not grasp at the time.

Or perhaps it is that they create the form and substance and impose it retrospectively. Looking back is an authentic, vital gesture, but outside the realm of art it is poignant and futile. You can change nothing by looking back; it is simply a forum for sadness and regret. Such is the emotional dynamic of this engrossing, affecting film from Kore-eda, a film of great clarity, intimacy and high seriousness.