Look Back: this bittersweet animation is a beautiful visual feast

Look Back
Look Back

Sliding Doors would be the natural go-to reference for most UK viewers of this short but sweet animation. But judging by one of the posters on her bedroom wall, its young heroine Fujino (Yumi Kawai) would be likelier to namecheck The Butterfly Effect.

Either way – and come to think of it, ‘Either Way’ would have been a solid alternative title – the debut feature from Japan’s recently founded Studio Durian has considerably more between its ears and in its heart than its famous precursors. Its art is wildly yet unassumingly beautiful – the visual equivalent of a cool jug of water on a hot afternoon.

And its plot, about small choices and the seismic consequences they sometimes entail, is accessible to younger viewers, yet philosophically rich enough to have older ones mulling its implications for days. In those respects and others, it often feels uncannily like an early Studio Ghibli work – and in fact director Kiyotaka Oshiyama, a key animator on last year’s Oscar-winning The Boy and the Heron, is one of a number of Durian’s stage to have been recruited from the anime house.

The film is about two very different high schoolers, Fujino and Kyomoto (Mizuki Yoshida), both of whom aspire to work as comic book artists in adulthood. Fujino is a gifted, gregarious storyteller, with a sense of humour that’s bracingly morbid. (In a typical Fujino work, a loved-up couple die in a car crash and are then reincarnated seconds before Earth is obliterated in a meteor strike.) Then there’s her reclusive classmate, who hasn’t actually attended school for years but is a draughtsman of considerable skill, and whose evocative yet plotless mood pieces make Fujino’s artwork look like childish doodles.

But what begins as a (largely one-sided) rivalry blossoms into a collaboration. Fujino is asked by her teacher to hand-deliver Kyomoto’s diploma, and the two become friends, spurring one other to new creative heights. A competition win draws industry attention – and in a sequence which typifies the film’s gorgeously delicate touch, the two head into a convenience store to see their first story in print, and the film retreats back outside to watch them through the window, allowing them to enjoy the moment in private.

Without giving too much away, fate intervenes in a frightening way – note the 12A rating is earned here – and Fujino and Kyomoto’s partnership is ended far too soon, with much artistic fruit left un-plucked. The film then reckons with the shared path the girls’ lives took, pondering whether the beauty of their connection justified the sadness it ultimately entailed.

But it also brilliantly repurposes their work together as a vehicle for solace – spinning off in boldly metaphysical directions even as it simultaneously zeroes in on the everyday wonder of the moments they shared. There’s a haiku-like purity to it: Look Back is as neat and yet also as overflowing as the four-panel strips in which its leads once diligently honed their craft. And if something so beautiful also feels too brief – well, that may be the idea.

Screening at the Tokyo Film Festival. On Amazon Prime Video now