Look Back (2024) is a short animated film about two artists Fujino and Kyomoto who make manga together. At first, Fujino feels jealous of the shut-in Kyomoto, who she feels is better at drawing than her. But, when her teacher asks her to deliver the graduation certificate to Kyomoto’s home, she learns that Kyomoto is actually a huge fan of her 4-koma comics and they start drawing manga together.

They work hard on making manga together, making seven one-shots as high schoolers, and get an offer to make a serialized manga. However, they have a disagreement as Fujino wants to accept the offer and Kyomoto wants to go to art university. They go separate ways, but as Fujino finds success as a mangaka she learns that Kyomoto has been murdered in a serial killing spree at the university she was attending.

Fujino imagines what it would have been like if she didn’t get Kyomoto to leave her room, but eventually remembers the time they spent together. We hear someone (Kyomoto, I think?) ask Fujino why she draws manga, which is followed by a scene of Fujino leaving Kyomoto’s home and returning to her workplace to create more manga.

I didn’t feel like this film did a particularly great job of relating the experience of creating things with the audience — in fact, after the film was over the theater put on a special interview with the director and cast which I felt did that job better than the actual film. In the special interview, the director and cast talked about what it was like to make things with each other, why they wanted to make things, and special moments that they shared together. For example, the director talks about how he didn’t want to work on this animation unless he had a reason to, and the voice acting cast had a story to share about how the director came into the room to share what he thought a scene should be like before yelling very loudly to convey what the characters should do.

The film does a pretty good job at the end of conveying the feeling that creators create for the earnest reactions they get from the audience through Fujino and Kyomoto’s relationship, but I think that’s about all the film shares in this regard. There’s much more about creating things that I feel they could have explored, like in the argument they have before going their own separate ways, but the story instead focuses on the relationship between the two characters. I related more personally to Wonka (2023).