Journalist and animation expert Andrew Osmond returns to AWN’s pages after almost 20 years, explaining his reshaped attitude - from skeptic to convert – towards anime while sharing his review of Kiyotaka Oshiyama’s newest film.
Introduction
Hello to a new column on current anime. I’ll endeavor to make it readable to both long-time fans and to relative outsiders, even skeptics. I’m Andrew Osmond, a journalist and author mostly based in Britain, though often found in Tokyo. Indeed, I’m writing this in a cozy “sharehouse” for foreigners in the city’s Shibuya district, home to the world’s biggest pedestrian crossing. If you’d like to skip right to the Look Back review, you can find it below.
I’ve been writing about anime long enough to have viewed the medium from both sides. Way, way back, I was something of a sceptic. In 2000, I put together a “debate article” for AWN, asking impertinent, devil’s advocate questions to critics and animators; questions like “Is anime just bad animation?” Back then, I didn’t call myself an anime fan, though I loved Ghibli films and other individual titles. An example was the charming 1996 fantasy Vision of Escaflowne, made when it was unusual to have an anime protagonist swept to a fantasy world.
Six years later, a film with the same idea, called Spirited Away, won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature and reshaped attitudes to anime. Ironically, the “going to another world” premise has since become one of anime’s worst clichés. Western fans often call such anime isekai and they’re mostly dross, though there are exceptions, like the Re:Zero saga, and this year’s animated Oscar champ, The Boy and the Heron.
In the 28 years from Escaflowne to Heron, my own understanding of anime has developed, as I started reviewing anime regularly as a journalist. Of course, many of these anime were tiresome or atrocious, but I’ve had the constant pleasure of encountering new titles that were entertaining, imaginative, and praiseworthy.
Many fans of broader animation remain wary of anime, understandably. Some anti-anime arguments were raised by the commenters in my decades-old AWN aforementioned debate article. More topically, the streaming-driven surge in anime’s popularity has the potential to distort fans’ perceptions of animation. It’s easy to find pundits bemoaning how many aspiring artists are locked into the so-called “anime style” – not really the anime style at all, but a stereotype hashed together with the grace of a web-scraping AI.
There are viewers who just can’t stand anime tropes. There’s the dearth of adult leads in favor of kids or teens; the almost surreal tonal whiplash from violence or tragedy to crude slapstick; and infamously, the lewd treatment of women and girls. That’s not mentioning the fannish investment of time that much anime demands. Even a one cour (season) series of 12 or 13 parts takes four or five hours to watch, and longer shows can demand more investment than the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
For such reasons, animation lovers may avoid anime, or stay with approved, reliable titles that can be watched in an afternoon. Most obviously, there are the Ghibli films, and those by select creators, such as Makoto Shinkai (Your Name), Naoko Yamada (A Silent Voice) and Masaaki Yuasa (Inu-Oh). Not coincidentally, those directors, like Ghibli, make self-contained features that skip anime’s brashest tropes.
As a skeptic-turned-convert, I’ll try writing for both sides in my coming columns. That is, I’ll try catering to readers who find anime interesting but frustrating, and for the all-in fans who’ve seen every episode of One Piece, Case Closed and Naruto/Boruto. Wherever you’re coming from, I hope you enjoy the trip.
A Look at Look Back
The new film Look Back is ideal for folks who seldom watch anime and wish to sample the medium. It’s a self-contained story, only 58 minutes long. It’s set in modern Japan, but with no obvious cultural baggage. Actually, it has some baggage that affects how viewers may see the ending, but that doesn’t stop it being pungently relatable. It’s being streamed worldwide – not on anime specialist platforms, but on Prime Video.
It’s nearly all told through the eyes of one girl, Fujino. We meet her when she’s an elementary schooler, though the story takes us through a decade. Even at the start, Fujino is a manga artist. She draws four-panel joke strips for her school paper, enjoying the status buzz whenever her new strip comes out and she hears the chuckles of her peers. Of course, she lies about how long her strips take. After pulling an all-nighter on a four-frame opus, she claims it took her five minutes. But who’d begrudge a kid a few stretchers?
Then, one terrible morning, the paper’s handed out and there’s another strip beside hers, drawn by some wimpy girl who can’t even come to school. Fujino looks at the rival strip, smiling complacently… then her eyes widen, and she tenses up, like she’s being sniped in slomo. The stranger’s strip is great, an artfully shaded mood piece, right beside Fujino’s own trite gag. She’s been usurped and doesn’t even know the girl who toppled her.
Some kids would quit there – Fujino could easily say she got bored of drawing. But she has too much pride. She buys up piles of sketchbooks and drawing guides and gets to furious self-study in her bedroom. Years ago, there was an old Ghibli film, 1995’s Whisper of the Heart (one of my favorites), which had a schoolgirl driven to write by love, in order to “catch up” with a cute boy musician. Fujino’s just motored by old-fashioned jealousy.
But to no avail. After a year, Fujino can’t catch up with the other girl’s strips, and she quits. Then she’s unexpectedly forced to go to her rival’s house, to deliver a gradation certificate. The girls finally meet, and everything changes.
Many reviews of Look Back highlight its depiction of the toil of drawing, all sweat and pencil-mileage. We glimpse reams of practice drawings, Everests of sketching. There’s a time-lapse of Fujino toiling oblivious through the seasons, focused only on her unforgiving sheet of paper. At one point, her older sister suggests she takes up karate instead. We’re sunk deep enough in Fujino’s mindset to laugh at the sibling’s fatuousness, though the moment pays off much, much later.
However, I like Look Back more for its journey out of selfishness. Fujino at the start is a talented child, full of ambition and envy. Later we see her treat the other girl (called Kyomoto) as a means, a tool. It’s only at the end, in horrendously painful circumstances, that Fujino finally comprehends the other girl as a person in her own right, realizing the value of what Kyomoto gave her. In short, Fujino realizes what a friend is, without the film putting it nearly as cornily; leave that to kids’ cartoons.
The most touching scenes of friendship are presented as sequential still images, mostly just girls in a room, but so vivacious that they squelch any gibe about cost-cutting. As for the animation, Look Back is undistinguished at times, like many anime, but it has elevated “tentpole” moments of fabulously vivid movement. Some anime fans call these moments sakuga - I wrote an article on that for another site, though with my skeptic’s hat on.
There’s an ostentatious scene of Fujino capering through a waterlogged field like a gleeful toddler, stomping in puddles. However, I preferred a scene of her floundering hilariously out of a house, just before Kiyomoto’s first appearance. Enough to say the mystery girl turns out to be a piteously funny actor. Reportedly, her debut scene was drawn by the master Japanese animator Toshiyuki Inoue, who animated battling bikers in Akira, while Fujino’s soggy caper was by Look Back’s director, Kiyotaka Oshiyama.
It’s the film’s ending that may prove divisive; some viewers may see it as a succession of cheap tricks. As I mentioned above, it may play better if you’ve seen other anime. The ending is magic wish-fulfilment, which the film invites you to see as both real and imaginary. (As Alan Moore would put it, this is an imaginary story; aren’t they all?) Either way, it’s typical of the kinds of things that happen in many anime and manga stories, though not just them. Just to take American examples, Look Back’s purported twist smacks of a Stephen King story, “Sorry, Right Number,” and a host of Twilight Zones.
But in one way, the film goes further. Its ending plainly references a recent Japanese tragedy in the real world. But even in this provocation, which some viewers might find upsetting or offensive, Look Back is following one of the most popular anime ever. That’s the 2016 blockbuster film Your Name, which twisted another real tragedy outrageously. Fans of classic Hollywood animation love to say you can do anything in a cartoon. Look Back affirms the adage, in a very Japan-specific way.
The film is based on a strip by Tatsuki Fujimoto, writer of a bestselling action saga called Chainsaw Man, though you emphatically don’t need to know it.
