The film is directed by Kiyotaka Oshiyama [ja], who also wrote the screenplay and served as a character designer, and produced by Studio Durian.

It stars Yuumi Kawai and Mizuki Yoshida as two girls with a passion for drawing—the outgoing Fujino (Kawai) and the truant recluse Kyomoto (Yoshida), the latter of whose artistic ability inspires a competitive fervor in Fujino that soon develops into a partnership, furthered by loss in a mass violence event.

One day, however, her teacher asks for her to give one of her strips over to Kyomoto (京本, Kyōmoto), a shut-in with severe social anxiety who longs to draw manga.

Over the span of a year, in spite of improvements, Fujino fails to meet Kyomoto's standards and eventually quits drawing, rekindling her social life.

Though it becomes very popular, publishing eleven tankōbon and receiving an anime adaptation, the adult Fujino feels unfulfilled without Kyomoto and cycles through assistants as a result.

On January 10, 2016, a man accusing Tohoku of plagiarizing his work commits mass murder there with a pickaxe, with Kyomoto being one of the casualties.

Devastated, Fujino puts Shark Kick on hiatus and returns home to attend the funeral, eventually entering Kyomoto's house alone.

When the killer arrives, however, everyone is saved by this reality's Fujino, who continued to pursue athletics and physically incapacitates the man before he can hurt Kyomoto.

[9][10] Look Back received a theatrical release in Japan by Avex Pictures on June 28, 2024, screening in 119 theaters nationwide.

[21] IndieWire's David Ehrlich gave the film a grade of "B+", praising the character design and the emotional weight of the story; Ehrlich wrote that, "the fleeting nature of Oshiyama's film, which so fluidly renders eons of labor with the lightness of memory and the brilliance of a shooting star, is what ultimately allows it to crystallize a truth that most artists can only hope to accept for themselves [...]: Making things isn't a waste of time or a way of isolating oneself from the world, but rather the most beautiful way of belonging to it.

"[22] Robbie Collin of The Telegraph gave the film a score of five out of five stars, praising its visuals as "wildly yet unassumingly beautiful" and its plot as accessible "yet philosophically rich"; he concluded: "There's a haiku-like purity to it: Look Back is as neat and yet also as overflowing as the four-panel strips in which its leads once diligently honed their craft.