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Reviewed from the 2026 Venice Film Festival
The central image of Koreeda Hirokazu’s Look Back references its title in an unexpectedly literal sense. A young girl sits in her room at her desk, working by hand on manga illustrations. Later in the film, this same image repeats: the young woman seated at a kitchen counter; in a school classroom; then as an adult in an office space. We watch her work, the camera placed behind her at a distance. Koreeda is implying that, to truly understand an artist, you must first understand what came before them and what they put behind them; the people and events that shaped them in their life and therefore in their work.
Fujino (Nanase Furi/Deguchi Natsuki) is a manga-making prodigy, regularly producing four-panel gag manga strips for her middle school newspaper. She enjoys the popularity and praise of her classmates, who are avid and faithful readers. Intent on being the best at her craft, Fujino is less than pleased to discover the arrival of another manga artist to the paper, who is placed adjacent to her own work. The manga’s panels contain intricate illustrations of school environments, which its artist has rarely glimpsed first-hand – Kyomoto (Okada Rokka/Makita Aju) is a shut-in who doesn’t attend class.
Upon graduating, Fujino is tasked with delivering Kyomoto her diploma, and the two girls soon discover that each was idolising the other all along. They team up to make manga together – applying to a contest and soon successfully attracting the attention of the biggest shōnen manga magazine in Japan.
Koreeda’s Look Back – his second feature this year, following Cannes premiere Sheep in the Box – is adapted from the internationally acclaimed one-shot manga of the same name by Chainsaw Man author Fujimoto Tatsuki. While Koreeda has adapted from manga before (Air Doll (2009), Our Little Sister (2015)), Look Back’se director brings that style down to a simmer, playing in a subtler, characteristically naturalistic mode
The film’s fragile emotion is buoyed by Bandoh Yûta’s gentle piano score, which twinkles with playful curiosity. Where the Fujino of the original manga and its 2024 anime adaptation is vocally boisterous and boastful, Koreeda and star Nanase instead soften the character to an inquisitive interest in the other artist and allow the ambience to do much of the talking.
Attention is frequently drawn to the actual act of manga-making, which Koreeda and his young cast studied intensively in pre-production. A line becomes an outline, which then gets shaded in and solidified. The art on the page develops much like the gradual friendship between the two girls. Drawing happens focusedly and straightforwardly in close-up and in the centre of the frame, while life happens complicatedly around it. Frequent reference is made to Miyazaki Hayao’s My Neighbour Totoro (1988), a film similarly interested in young people’s experience of personal growth while grappling with the inescapability of time and the mortality of those that they love.
The girls ultimately have different goals in life, and Fujino goes it alone. She becomes a bestselling shōnen manga author, and an anime adaptation of her series is announced. With every pen scratch and scrape that she makes, time moves along. Two trains pass outside her office window – each heading in opposite directions. Fujino remains at her workstation through days and nights, but personal tragedy soon stops her in her tracks.
The fantastical sentimentality of the film’s third act, an imagined alternate history through which Fujino posthumously re-examines their friendship, initially feels fanciful – crass even. In Koreeda’s hands however, its implausible plotting ultimately proves resonant. The filmmaker returns to the final image of his earlier film Monster (2023) as the girls run animatedly and freely through an open scene – another fantasy moment – but this time he doesn’t cut to black.
It speaks to the idea that, much as we might like to rewrite the past in search of a more palatable truth, the act of revision will lead you back to reality. Loss can be an overwhelming full stop, yes, but the continuation of life is always an ellipsis.
