English Dub Review: Look Back

Overview

Fujino, a fourth-grader, serializes a four-panel manga strip in the school newspaper receiving rave reviews from her classmates. But one day, her teacher tells her that Kyomoto, a truant student, wants to publish her own manga in the newspaper. The two girls’ shared passion for manga brings them together until one day, an event shatters everything. A heart-wrenching coming-of-age story unfolds.

Our Take

The nearly hour-long feature film Look Back isn’t so much of a look back as it is a more of a multiversal tale. Imagining whether or not Fujino made a certain choice in terms of whether or not she should have made friends with somebody who would mean so much for her only for her friend to choose a different path. It’s an interesting idea, but one that seems to had been cut short for either budgetary reasons or some reason.

Two-thirds of Look Back is absolutely breathtaking. Kiyotaka Oshiyama’s art direction is world class here and not just a run-of-the-mill anime. Rather this Studio Durian-produced feature clearly has a heart given that it’s attempting to approach subject matter that most people in the world usually do not have the skin to even try. From a dialogue standpoint, the script is strong even if most of the premise is somewhat ordinary, probably by choice so as to showcase that any given day could be your last day on Earth. Valerie Lohman’s portrayal as Fujino has immense depth and shows the actor’s many levels of sophistication in the varying emotions that the protagonist has to showcase throughout her arduous ordeal. The highs, the lows, they are all on display here and Valerie crushes it. Same goes for Grace Lu as Kyomoto of whom doesn’t get as MUCH screen time as Fujino given what actually happens, and I’ll touch more on this in a bit, but what she makes of a slightly shortened role in an already shorter-than-usual feature she makes it her own.

As exquisite as the first two-thirds of Look Back are is how disappointed I am by most of the third act. Mostly because as Fujino is reminiscing about her time with Kyomoto we’re treated to a rather lengthy slide show…and I mean lengthy. For my money I would’ve liked to have seen a longer runtime where the flashback scenes to scenes that aren’t showcased at all and maybe would’ve been further animated by the studio, but for whatever reason, none of that comes to pass. I get that flashbacks are a common trend in anime, but usually those flashbacks remind us of scenes that we had actually seen before, not of scenes that hadn’t even really been shown in the first place.

With the visceral nature of the plot and even in learning more about Fujino, lengthening the plot would’ve allowed viewers to further invest their love and affection for the bond that both Fujino and Kyomoto shares, so when we shave a potentially a quarter of the feature length off, for whatever reason, the shortened real estate doesn’t lend itself very well and thus I am frowning upon. I’m giving extra points for Oshiyama’s character designs and script, but someone’s getting a knock on the head for not going the extra mile for the climax.

Watch Look Back on Prime Video here.