brief thoughts on Look Back (read disclaimer)

DISCLAIMER: a very tentative blog post about kind of a touchy subject, talking about the real-world implications between Look Back and the KyoAni tragedy... if that sounds distressing to you, you should give this one a pass. definitely not advertising this one anywhere bc i feel like the more this gets discussed the more harm it's gonna do (especially with the anime community. y'know, the fanbase not exactly known for their capacity to partake in nuanced discussions.). just wanna get these thoughts out somewhere because it does have some bearing on my viewing of the movie.

seeing the obvious resemblances to the kyoani arson was......something. gonna need more time to know how i feel about that one.

and also the manga being released on the very same day of the year that it happened...yeaaaaa idk bout that one chief

thinking back on it, i'm still left with mixed feelings...how one would take it is completely subjective but i think i agree with this tweet bc i know with certainty these similarities weren't written callously or with malice.

the issue lies with basing a central plot beat and arguably message of the whole work around such a real, and tragic event. just conceptually kind of a misguided idea, no matter how positive of a message you're making out of it; there are ways to portray that message without these obvious references to real life events. especially for an event as recent as this one, it requires an abundance of tact and caution—because as touching of a message it's building towards, it, just like everything else, exists under capitalism and is being sold for real money; perhaps in a perfect world, artists could process their feelings on recent events like these without inviting all this controversy.

i think it's a perfectly valid thing for fujimoto to process his grief as a kyoani fan through his art, but when he then sells that message for money it feels less like a tribute and more like exploitation. but then again, without the publishing capabilities of shueisha, he probably would never have been able to create something like this in the first place; so in that way it's kind of an unavoidable issue. (the ways art and the aims of capitalism directly contradict each other, and yet simultaneously need each other in a world like ours is a whole other can of worms that i probably shouldn't get into rn but yea)

perhaps morally it would be more "right" to say he shouldn't have made it at all, but saying that also misses the point of the work: that for artists like him, he can't help but make art. kyomoto would have continued to make art even without fujino's influence, just as fujimoto probably would have made a story akin to this even if the kyoani tragedy hadn't happened. but as it stands, i can't ignore this pretty sizable blemish on the movie i watched (still can't speak for the manga); even if it was comparably minor compared to everything else in the movie, it's still a part of the work's context & upbringing that's very hard to ignore