If there’s one anime film you should watch this year besides Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece The Boy and the Heron, it’s the hour-long manga adaptation Look back. She’s been lying there ever since November 7, 2024 on Amazon Prime Video and has since brought tears to the eyes of animation fans of all stripes for various reasons.
The celebrated manga template was created by Tatsuki Fujimoto, of all people, who is known for the darkly humorous action fantasy Chainsaw Man. With wonderful animation from Studio Durian, director Kiyotaka Oshiyama (Space Dandy) successfully implemented this most personal work about artistic impulse and coping with grief. But a dramatic scene that seems to come out of nowhere has a tragically true background.
Anime highlight Look Back on Amazon: That’s what the manga adaptation is about
In Look Back we meet Ayumu Fujino, who as a girl draws funny manga that are published in the school newspaper. When her classmate Kyomoto, who is always absent due to illness, is also printed and turns out to be a brilliant illustrator, this spurs Fujino on to become even better. Years later they finally get to know each other and a deep friendship and collaboration develops, which opens the doors to the manga industry for the two girls.
Spoilers follow: Years later, when Fujino is busy with her professional action manga Shark Kick, she receives shocking news from Kyomoto’s art school: a man who thought his drawings were stolen has killed several students during a shooting spree. Under normal circumstances, a coming-of-age story would be hard-pressed to have such an out-of-nowhere plot point, but the incident is based on a true story from five years ago.
The tragic background of the manga and anime title Look Back
In July 2019, a man laid one Fire at the anime studio Kyoto Animation and killed 36 people and injured 34 others. This is one of the most devastating massacres Japan has seen since the end of World War II. The confused person in charge was convinced that the renowned anime artists had stolen from his amateur novel, with ridiculous parallels such as discounts (of varying degrees!) when characters buy meat.
Japanese courts rarely impose the death penalty anymore – the last time someone was executed was in 2022 for several murders. In the case of the KyoAni arsonist, one of those rare maximum sentences was handed out earlier this year, Variety reported. And this despite the fact that some do not consider the perpetrator, who was also seriously injured and was rehabilitated for a long time, to be mentally competent.
We don’t know whether author Fujimoto personally knew anyone from the studio. However, the deadly attack left its mark on the entire manga and anime industry in Japan and Look Back is quite evident his way of dealing with it and processing it artistically. In a profound way, he asks why we create art at all and whether all the suffering is worth it in the end.
Ready for more emotional damage? The names of his two protagonists Fujino and Kyomoto can be put together to form Fujimoto’s name – where the Kyo (京) comes from Kyomoto with exactly the same character as in Kyoto animation writes. Ouch.
Similar to Quentin Tarantino with Inglorious Basterds or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Tatsuki Fujimoto also imagines what could have been and has his manga artist (who partly stands for himself) personally intervene with a karate kick in order to personally eliminate the assassin in an alternative version of the events. A cathartic practice for dealing with grief and tragic events.
The Look Back manga was published on July 19, 2021, exactly two years after the KyoAni attack. As if the author were telling himself, the first page reveals the origin of the title, which Fujimoto takes from the Oasis song Don’t Look Back in Anger has.
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