‘The Potentials’ unpacks the dilemmas of a manga assistant in middle age

Go Morita plays an aging manga artist who’s put his creative ambitions on permanent hold in Shoichi Morimoto and Takuma Sato’s “The Potentials.” | © 2026 “The Potentials” Film Partners

Oct 23, 2026

They say you should write about what you know, but it doesn’t hurt to extrapolate. Shoichi Morimoto drew on his many years of experience working as an assistant director — including on multiple films by Hirokazu Koreeda — when writing the screenplay for his debut feature, co-directed with Takuma Sato (“Any Crybabies Around?”). However, rather than yet another movie about making a movie, “The Potentials” shifts the setting to the world of manga.

In the process, Morimoto and Sato have created a quirky counterpart to Koreeda’s recent “Look Back.” But while that film’s characters were just embarking on a career in comics, the protagonist of “The Potentials” is several decades further down the road — even if it’s hard to say he’s made much progress.

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