Look Back - Movie Discussion
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If you’ve watched I Want to Eat Your Pancreas, how similar is it in emotional impact to this, in your opinion? I haven’t seen that yet.
Look Back a great movie and am very thankful to experience watching this in the theater. My rating on it is purely on its technical merits. I guess I couldn’t relate on it at an emotional level. I especially love the ambiguity of the eponymous 4-koma scene. Is it an alternate timeline? Or did Kyomoto pen the comic far in advance, without knowledge of her eventual fate? It’s up to you.
I haven’t watched I Want to Eat Your Pancreas either, so I can’t directly compare the two. I think Look Back was touching for sure, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it reached the top tier of emotional anime movies for me. I ended up not needing my box of tissues for example.
By comparison, when I want to watch something like Tale of the Princess Kaguya, I prepare a fresh box of tissues and go ahead and clear my schedule for the whole weekend. That movie destroys me when I watch it.
I’ve seen I Want to Eat Your Pancreas. Kimisui (the short title, because it’s so long lol) kind of feels like getting stabbed in the chest then it’s over. Like what @wjs018@ani.social said, Look Back wasn’t top tier emotional, at least in the same sense as Kimisui.
Kimisui / Look Back spoilers
Kimisui banks on the audience’s anticipation on when Yamauchi dies because it’s pre-established that she does die (movie opens with her funeral). The twist takes a different form. There’s also the reveal of the main character’s name. After Yamauchi dies and the MC goes through a cathartic moment, life goes on for him.
In Look Back, I kept thinking to myself “oh it’s not over yet?” There are several moments after the “twist” when I thought the movie was going to end already but it kept going (for good reasons) so the emotion you feel is a bit different. Perhaps a bit dull. Maybe you can say Look Back doesn’t have a “climax” in the same way Kimisui does.
Also, Kimisui is grounded completely on reality while Look Back has a segment where two timelines converge. So maybe the realism in Kimisui makes it more emotional.
Thanks for the response. I guess I’ll check for myself once I come round to watching it.
For context, Violet Evergarden, Your Lie in April (the first watch especially, unresolved past issues and all that), and A Place Further Than The Universe are some that emotionally destroyed me.