Rukku Bakku

Hirokazu Kore-eda  (2026)

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s new film, showing at the London Film Festival a few weeks after its world premiere in Venice, is visually fluent and, except for a protracted finale, well-constructed.  As often before, this director’s purposeful assurance and calm make for pleasurable viewing (and came as a big relief just a couple of hours after watching the abominable Wicker at the Festival).  Yet the story that Kore-eda tells in Look Back feels insubstantial.

The action takes place in Japan’s Tōhoku region, in and around the city of Yamagata.  The two main characters begin the film as children but are young women for most of the narrative.  At the start, Fujino (Furi Nanase) is in her final year of elementary school.  She’s popular and admired, especially for her manga illustrations, which regularly appear in the school newspaper.  When her class teacher (Kankurō Kudō) decides to include manga by another girl alongside her work, Fujino feels anxious and threatened.  The new artist’s style is very different from her own, but Fujino can see that it shows talent; some of her classmates say as much, or even that they prefer the new artist.  This unforeseen rival’s name is Kyomoto.  She’s not currently attending school because of ill health, but at the end of the year still qualifies, like Fujino and her friends, for an elementary school-leaving certificate, which Fujino’s teacher asks her to deliver to Kyomoto’s home.  Fujino reluctantly agrees, thus meets Kyomoto (Rokka Okada) for the first time and starts to warm to her when Kyomoto makes immediately clear that she treasures Fujino’s drawings.  Their shared love of manga and creative talents are the foundation of a bond between the girls that continues to strengthen throughout their teenage years (Fujino now played by Natsuki Deguchi and Kyomoto by Aju Makita).

Kore-eda’s Still Walking (2008) changed my mind about watching Japanese cinema – or, at least, some Japanese cinema.  I’ve since seen three of the five films he made before Still Walking and most of the dozen made subsequently; it’s thanks to him that I started to appreciate Yasujirō Ozu.  I must confess, though, to a cultural blind spot about Kore-eda’s latest choice of material.  Although he first came across it in book form, Look Back started life as a 2021 ‘one-shot web manga’, written and illustrated by Tatsuki Fujimoto.  An anime film adaptation, directed and with a screenplay by Kiyotake Oshiyama, was released in 2024.  Kore-eda’s live-action film went into production the following year.  My knowledge and understanding of manga are negligible:  it’s probably quite unfair to assume that its stories and characters are simplistic.  But Kore-eda’s version of Look Back, at the same time as celebrating manga, translates Fujimoto’s original and Oshiyama’s anime into a form of screen storytelling that situates characters in a basically credible reality and, by doing so, sets up further expectations of a real world.  I don’t think Kore-eda meets those expectations.

Fujino and Kyomoto are respectively outgoing and withdrawn.  The ill health that keeps Kyomoto away from elementary school is severe social anxiety – and she is completely isolated:  even at eleven or twelve, she appears to live alone, though she surely can’t.  At the same age, Fujino is seen at home with her parents (Kayo Noro and Ryō Ikeda) and elder sister (Miyu Sasaki), but they’re soon jettisoned to clear the decks:  Look Back focuses exclusively on the protagonists’ manga collaborations and friendship – which, presumably, help remedy Kyomoto’s agoraphobia.  Presumably, because she and the teenage Fujino are never shown in high school or with other friends, either female or male.  Instead, Kore-eda fast-forwards to the fruition of their manga partnership and the rift between them that then occurs.  The pair receive an offer from Maeda (Masaki Suda), an editor on Shōnen Jump (an actual weekly manga anthology), to serialise the manga they’ve co-created.  While Fujino is thrilled, Kyomoto is now unexpectedly determined to enrol in art college and develop independently from her friend.  Possessive Fujino is hurt, and worried – she sees her artistic identity as inextricably linked with Kyomoto’s – but she starts work for Maeda, who guides Fujino’s successful transition into the world of commercial manga.  Kyomoto gets a place on an art course at a local college.

Cinematographer Senzo Ueno’s lighting of the rural landscapes of the friends’ adolescent years in Tōhoku is beautiful.  Kore-eda and production designer Shinsuke Kojima gracefully interweave these images with Tatsuko Fujimoto’s original manga illustrations.  I realise that Fujino and Kyomoto are meant to be so thoroughly dedicated to manga that it’s their whole life – to the exclusion of other things you might expect teenagers to do and be preoccupied with.  But both girls, though nicely played throughout, always seem less than three-dimensional.  In the first part of Look Back, I might have mistaken this for something else if I hadn’t seen other Kore-eda treatments of children.  The portrait of the young Fujino has the feel of a sympathetic yet condescending adult perspective on childhood – a suggestion that what seem matters of life and death to a child will come to be understood as less important in the light of experience.  Since I can’t believe, from my experience of Kore-eda, that he would patronise a child character in this way, I can only assume that Fujino’s shallowness reflects her manga origins – and Kore-eda’s commitment to staying faithful to those origins.

The story doesn’t develop greater depth even when it turns tragic – although the telling of it suddenly becomes far more tricksy.  Working late one evening, Fujino happens to see a TV news report of a horrifying incident on the campus of a local art college:  an intruder, armed with a pickaxe, has attacked and killed students there.  Kyomoto is one of the fatalities.  Fujino’s grief and guilty feelings combine to make her think she’s responsible for what has happened.  On that errand with the school-leaving certificate, Fujino prompted reclusive Kyomoto to leave her room and venture into what became friendship.  Fujino sees herself as having started the domino effect that led years later to Kyomoto’s death:  she now constructs in her mind a what-if sequence of events whereby Kyomoto survives.

In this alternative reality, Fujino and Kyomoto don’t meet face-to-face until the day of the attack on the art college, which Fujino thwarts.  She’s not a professional manga artist but a karate expert, who happens to be in the right place at the right time and uses her karate skills to fight off the assailant and his pickaxe.  Fujino sustains minor injuries and is just about to be loaded into an ambulance when Kyomoto, a student at the art college, appears on the scene.  This becomes the start of their friendship, though not the start of the manga connection between them:  it’s still the case that Kyomoto admired Fujino’s manga drawings in the elementary school newspaper and felt a kinship with her.  To express her gratitude to Fujino – for stimulating her own fascination with manga and for her heroism on the college campus – Kyomoto draws a manga strip, entitled ‘Look Back’, which depicts how Fujino has, in two ways, saved her life.

This launches a climactic, lyrical anime sequence (designed by Yuko Kuno), in which Fujino and Kyomoto take wing with birds and even swim in a magical sky.  The sequence calls to mind the quasi-paradisal conclusion to Kore-eda’s last but one film, Monster (2023), but the effect is very different.  The corresponding sequence in Monster, with the two boys of the story happily reunited, was puzzling and quite different in style from what had gone before; Look Back‘s anime apotheosis fits neatly into Kore-eda’s overall scheme.  It also underlines the lack of complexity or even ambiguity in Fujino and Kyomoto’s relationship compared with that of the Monster boys, which had hints of gay attraction and a definite romantic quality.  Neither of those things registers in Look Back, which is all about manga love (a love that doesn’t come across as the representation of something more).  A film is sometimes criticised as being a good idea on paper.  This one gives a very particular meaning to that criticism.

14 October 2026