Look Back

this movie captures a particular feeling so well that I had to just sit down after a while and reminisce.  I’ve always been into video. whether it was film, or YouTube, or tv, the act of just setting up a camera and seeing what happened was always so fascinating to me. I received my first camera at 8 years old, a white and silver Flip video camera, which could shoot one hour of video before you needed to delete things and ate through AA batteries like nobody’s business. I was always thinking in video-based stories, making these shitty little videos where my toys or friends or both were going through these insane adventures. it was so much fun…but there was a bit of a disconnect.  my friends and I had fun making videos, sure, but that’s just because making a simple, silly video in an afternoon is kind of inherently fun. but when you live and breathe moviemaking like I did, there’s this difference in the way you see it. as a kid, I couldn’t articulate it. I would work with my friends to make these videos, and it would be fun, but I was always wanting more out of it. what I think it was is as a creative or artistic person or whatever you want to call it, there’s this absolute magic in meeting “your people”, I.e. the people who have the same passion and ambition you have.  that may seem obvious, but I went to film school and out of the 90+ people I interacted with, there were like 10 or less I feel really aligned with me in this way. it wasn’t because those others aren’t cool or were untalented or didn’t really fuck with movies like that or anything, some of them sucked ass but a lot of those guys I was friends/friendly with. but finding your artistic match just feels better than working with good people, regardless of how good they are. The way my college experience was, there 2-3 semesters where me and my group of “my people” really got to work together uninhibited, and the rest of the time I only worked with them tangentially. sometimes are groups were assigned, and we weren’t assigned together, and while we could certainly help each other, they weren’t being graded on helping so priorities, yada yada.  its a wavelength thing. it’s having people completely understand your vision. it’s describing the exact reference of a shot I gave before I even had half of my sentence finished. it’s immediately knowing how to turn something from not working to being better than it was even imagined. it’s having over half of my directors notes being “that was perfect, let’s do it one more time just to be safe.” it’s not wanting to do “what will easily work,” to just get the project done, but embracing ambition, and really swinging for the fences, safety net be damned. It’s pulling all nighters in the editing room and still laughing and joking around on hour 29 because making art is still fun. it’s Fujino practically dancing in the rain as she rushes back to her sketchbooks. intuition at an extreme emotional and technical level. it also helps that we were all great friends, spending a lot of time just enjoying each other in addition to working well.  but most of these people graduated before me. and while I still did good stuff without them, it was so much harder, and frankly, I don’t think anything I made after was as good, despite my skills developing further. after college we’ve largely moved on. we don’t keep in proper touch. some of us still work with cameras, I think. life gets in the way a lot. I spent quite a bit on some blackmagic cameras a while back, just like we used in school. they’ve mostly collected dust.  very lengthy anecdote aside, this movie understands that feeling of finding your artistic soulmate so well. so much of storytelling, whether it be film, books, or tv, is focused on the “tortured artist,” and yeah, that’s certainly a part of the journey, but most of my artistic yearning isn’t from a deep anger at my lot in life, but a desire for things to feel effortless again.  needless to say, I really liked Look Back. I think the relationship between Fujino and Kyomoto was a joy to watch unfold. the fact that so much of it was nonverbal was so well done, and goes back to that artistic kinship idea I was talking about. I already mentioned that scene in the rain, probably my favorite moment here, but there’s so many fantastic moments, from Fujino dragging Kyomoto by the hand as they spend their prize money, to seeing Kyomoto’s room full of wall to wall Shark Kick, it’s the perfect blend of heartwarming and devastating, the expressiveness of both the animation and music add so much to every scene. I think Look Back is paced quite well, but I could watch 3 hours of this easy. absolutely fantastic.