Envy comes with the territory of being an artist. No matter how confident you are, being impressed by another’s work comes with the second feeling of wishing that you’d made it yourself.
That’s what Fujino experiences early in “Look Back.” As a grade schooler, she’s praised for her four panel manga strips published in the school newspaper. Then the truant, unseen Kyomoto debuts her column and Fujino falls on her face at the sight of the professional looking sketches. She hunkers down and practices drawing day and night, but even after years of filling sketchbooks, her style isn’t as polished as Kyomoto’s.
This seems to be a classic Mozart and Salieri story of artistic jealousy, but Fujimoto takes this dynamic in a happier direction. As teenagers, Kujino meets Kyomoto and learns her “rival” is her no.1 fan, as impressed by her comedy doodles as Fujino was by her polished landscape art. Fujino keeps a cool face but you can tell her heart is pumping from the praise. She thought Kyomoto was too far ahead for her to ever catch up, now she learns her imagined challenger really thought the exact same thing of her?
There is not one singular skill for being an artist. Kyomoto draws with beautiful, lifelike detail, and Fujino has an inventive sense of story and humor. So they decide to draw together, in a partnership that plays to their strengths; Kyomoto draws the backgrounds, while Fujino comes up with the story and characters to fill them.
“Look Back” is a play on (English) words; many frames of the manga and film are wide shots looking at Fujino and Kyomoto’s backs as they’re hunched over desks, drawing. Making art is hard, and “Look Back” suggests the process itself can’t offer self-gratification — only sharing it can. Oshiyama has called his film a rebuttal to generative AI, one that champions the necessity of human intention and craft. I walked away from the film feeling more awed than ever by artists and their imaginations; when expressing ourselves, we writers are limited to words.