Look Back Has Now Been Adapted Twice in 26 Months

Kore-eda Hirokazu's Look Back opens in Japan today. It premiered in competition at Venice five days ago, it was shot entirely on 35mm across four seasons in Akita, and it runs 99 minutes.

Two years and two months ago, Kiyotaka Oshiyama's animated version of the same 143-page manga opened in Japan on 119 screens, passed a billion yen in under three weeks, won the Japan Academy Film Prize for Best Animated Picture, and currently sits at 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes across 25 reviews.

Which raises the question the entire Venice press corps has been circling: what is this for?

It is not a remake, whatever you are about to read

One review filed from Venice already describes the film as "this live-action adaptation of the 2024 animated film." It is not. It is an independent adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto's 2021 manga, under a different rights arrangement, with a different distributor, and structured differently.

The structural difference is the interesting part. Kore-eda covers the pair's thirteen-year arc from elementary school onward and casts four young actors across two ages — Natsuki Deguchi and Furi Nanase as the adult and child Fujino, Aju Makita and Rokka Okada as Kyomoto. Animation does not need to do that; a drawing simply ages. Live action has to solve it with bodies, and Kore-eda chose to solve it by doubling every role.

Expect the remake framing to propagate anyway. It is easier to type.

The revision nobody remembers correctly

The manga's climax involves an attack on an art school, and readers in July 2021 immediately read it against a real mass-casualty event. Psychiatrists objected publicly that the assailant's depiction risked reinforcing prejudice against people living with schizophrenia. Shueisha's stated reason for what followed was to avoid fostering discrimination against patients.

What is almost always reported as one change was two:

• 19 July 2021. The original web release. The attacker's stated grievance was plagiarism — that his work had been stolen
• 2 August 2021. Editorial altered the dialogue and an accompanying news caption. The replacement grievance was about uselessness, about not being of value to society
• 3 September 2021. The collected volume reverted the line back toward the original plagiarism framing

So the version currently in print is closer to what Fujimoto first published than to the August revision. The story everyone tells — that the manga was sanitised and stayed sanitised — has the ending backwards. Worth noting too that the changes were made by the platform's editorial team; "Fujimoto caved" overstates what is actually documented about who decided what.

The readership record, with the metric attached

You will see Look Back described as the most-read one-shot in the platform's history. The verified numbers are page views on a free service: about 1.2 million the first night, 2.5 million within 24 hours, over 4 million in two days, 5 million by the end of that July.

Those are real and they are enormous. They are also views, not readers, not purchases, and a free web page is not commensurable with any sales figure. "2.5 million views in its first 24 hours" is the honest sentence. "Most-read manga ever" is the one that travels.

For what it is worth, it converted: the collected volume did roughly 74,000 copies in week one and 80,000 in week two, and has passed a million in circulation.

Venice did not agree with itself

The reviews out of the premiere split hard, and the split is not about quality so much as about whether the transposition was a good idea at all.

• One outlet called the characters thinly sketched and the film all sugar with no nutritional value
• Another headlined its report with the word "disappoints"
• A third gave it an A-minus and called it a tender sensory ode to youth
• A fourth, giving it three and a half stars, put its finger on the actual problem: in live action there is less escape from the tragedy than animation allowed

That last observation is the whole argument in one line. Oshiyama made a film about drawing, in drawings, in under an hour. Kore-eda made it in live action, on film stock, at nearly twice the length — and spent a good deal of that extra runtime, by several accounts, watching actors draw.

What Fujimoto's work is worth now

The context for a Palme d'Or winner adapting a free web comic is that Fujimoto has become, in about five years, one of the most commercially significant properties in the medium. Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc, released last September, took ¥10.81 billion in Japan and 191.4 million dollars worldwide, and topped the American box office on its opening weekend.

Against that, Look Back has now been adapted twice in 26 months, in two media, by two directors, for two distributors. That is not a normal thing to happen to 143 pages given away for free.

The line worth keeping

Kore-eda's own explanation, from the Venice selection materials, is the least promotional thing anyone has said about this film. The manga reached him during the pandemic, at a point when he was not certain the work mattered — and, as he put it, it gave him back his posture.

A director who had lost his footing adapting a comic about two girls who draw because they cannot stop is, whatever the reviews say, a coherent reason for the film to exist. Venice hands out its awards tomorrow, which means as of this morning nobody knows whether the festival agrees.