There has always been a magic touch to Japanese humanist Hirokazu Koreeda’s observation of children, and that strength is what first pulls us in to Look Back. This slender, but visually and emotionally captivating story takes its cue from the poetic changing of the seasons that mark its passage of roughly a decade in the lives of two gifted young artists. Based on Tatsuki Fujimoto’s popular one-shot manga of the same name, the minor-key drama can’t help but feel a little padded compared to the faithful 2024 anime adaptation, which did everything it needed to do in under an hour. But the new film’s lingering poignancy is undeniable.
Watching that economical previous screen version, directed by industry veteran Kiyotaka Oshiyama (a former Studio Ghibli animator who worked on Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron), it’s inevitable to wonder what will be left in a live-action take on the material once the exquisite beauty of the artwork is gone. But Koreeda and cinematographer Senzo Ueno create an equivalent for the intoxicating pen and paintbrush images, with soft colors, caressing light and elemental texture, at a certain point morphing into stylized anime when the limitations of reality and the escape offered by art demand it.
