An ideal team … Natsuki Deguchi and Aju Makita in Look Back. Photograph: Courtesy: London Film Festival View image in fullscreen An ideal team … Natsuki Deguchi and Aju Makita in Look Back. Photograph: Courtesy: London Film Festival Film Review Look Back review – Kore-eda’s ode to friendship, manga and artistic success Two obsessive artists team up to achieve their dreams, but then their aspirations diverge
Peter Bradshaw Fri 16 Oct 2026 18.50 CEST Last modified on Fri 16 Oct 2026 18.52 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google H irokazu Kore-eda’s sad and beautiful film is about friendship, about the ecstasy and burden of success and about what it means to have an artistic vocation, especially when that vocation is pursued collaboratively, with your best friend. It is adapted by Kore-eda from the standalone, or “one-shot”, online manga story of the same title by Tatsuki Fujimoto, which has in fact already had an anime movie adaptation.
Fujino, played by Furi Nanase as a 13-year-old and later by Natsuki Deguchi, is a dedicated would-be manga artist who dreams of being published and adapted for the movies. It is her personal and artistic destiny to come into contact, in her early teens, with fellow manga obsessive Kyomoto, who is played first by Rokka Okada and then as an adult by Aju Makita. Theirs is a kind of platonic but passionate love story.
Fujino begins the story as someone who is very pleased with herself. In school, she has became a virtual celebrity for her simple four-frame yonkoma manga strips in the class magazine. But then her homeroom teacher tells her that he is giving space to a regular manga from another girl, Kyomoto, who suffers from anxiety and never comes into school. Kyomoto’s work stuns Fujino. It seems to her (and all her classmates) to be patently better than hers. Her own work had been simplistically about the faces and the dialogue and the story; Kyomoto’s is more subtly about background ambience – the still life-type landscapes and scenes are far more accomplished.
Fujino feels like a Mozart who suddenly turned into a Salieri. She more or less abandons manga in that moment, morosely pursuing sports, in particular karate. When, at the end of term, her teacher asks her to drop off Kyomoto’s graduation certificate at her house – Kore-era playfully allows us to see that the teacher is trying to engineer a friendship between these two young people – Fujino is resentful and reluctant. She goes there intending brusquely to leave the item and go, but a chaotic mishap means they meet face to face and Kyomoto emotionally calls her “sensei” and says she is her biggest fan. Fujino joyfully resumes drawing and they become soulmates and partners, fusing into one manga creator, an ideal team, winning prizes and commissions. Fujino devises the foregrounded story and characters while Kyomoto’s considered artistry creates the deep emotional mood and context.
But just when they are on a roll, their careers at a staggering momentum that other, older, artists can only dream of … Kyomoto says she wants to quit and go to art college, to be a better artist, while she still has enough time, enough humility to learn. Fujino is furious and the break between them is more painful, more important, than any sundered love affair.
Kore-eda shows us the heartbreak that this leads to, and to an agonising “sliding doors” type reverie about how things could have been different, how Fujino could have redeemed herself as the lesser artist. F…