Japanese writer-director-editor Hirokazu Koreeda has been hit or miss since his Palme d’Or win for Shoplifters in 2018, and that’s putting it lightly. It’s been more like bullseye or bunk. The Truth was a disaster (i.e., false), Broker was serviceable, Monster was a minor masterpiece and this year’s Sheep in the Box is arguably his worst movie in 31 years. But he’s hit the bullseye again with his second feature of 2026, Look Back, a live-action adaptation of the 2021 one-shot manga that was adapted into a popular animé film in 2024.

Fujino and Kyomoto are local manga prodigies in a rural Japanese village, but they couldn’t be less alike. Fujino (Furi Nanase in middle school, Natsuki Deguchi grown up) is a social butterfly and storyteller extraordinaire who cranks out fully developed mangas for the school paper. Kyomoto (Rokka Okada, Aju Makita) puts out even more than Fujino, but she’s less focused on story and character – a social recluse who never comes to school, specializes in background artistry and has a stan-like admiration for Fujino’s storytelling chops.

After a surprise encounter at the end of middle school, the two become fast friends and partner up in high school under the collective pen name ​“Kyo Fujino” to submit a 41-page one-shot that takes them a year to draw, wins them a coveted runner-up prize in a revered manga journal, and sends them into semi-professional work as an authorial duo unleashing bangers like ​“Metal Parade,” ​“Sharkman vs. Chickenman” and ​“Cicada Humans.” It’s only a matter of time before they start to imagine their lives differently and heartwrenching drama sets in, but the lion’s share of Look Back is delightful, playful and innocent in its evocation of Kyo Fujino’s work and connection, locked into the simple, intricate beauties of childhood discovery and artistic devotion.

The pixie colors of Look Back are radiant, from dainty pastels to electrics. Warm fall foliage, turquoise cubbies, swans on a crystal blue pond. There’s a mint-green or lavender tint to most images that powders the frame like a thin, gently fallen coat of fresh snow. In winter, snow is captured in deep lilac, other times in a blinding white and others in capri. The colors are so extreme that they come across as neons in natural settings. In terms of Venice premieres, it’s even more colorful than Primetime – a colorist showdown, as Kyo Fujino would have it.

Senzo Ueno’s 35mm cinematography is as thick and crunchy as any film photography finer than 16mm gets, a dew of crisp grain texturing each composition with the opposite visual aesthetic of any animé or modern one-shot manga. The only exception is the sudden interruption by a Rotoscoped animé sequence, which swarms the film with reality-shattering wonder.

Yûta Bandoh’s delicate, harp-like guitar and piano score is complemented by the faintest of bells and strongest of swells from strings in the ether. The instrumentation and tone could be horribly hokey but Koreeda manages to play the sentimentality of it to a tee. It draws out the wistfulness of the film that’s buried beneath the invasive pleasantries and eventually emerges from the fertile soil of Kyo Fujino’s partnership. And it points to the pain to come. By the end, I had no idea how much time was left, my phone was thankfully out of reach and every minute more was a well-polished visual treat. I didn’t want it to end.