Genre Animation

Look Back (2024)

Item: Look Back
Rating: 5.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★★★★★ — Look Back (2024)

I don't hand out five stars lightly. And I don't think I've ever sat with a film the way I sat with Look Back after it finished. Just over an hour long, available on Amazon Prime, and it might be the best animated film I have ever seen. Not just the best anime. The best animated film. Full stop. I'm aware of how that sounds. I don't care.

What the film does in that brief runtime is nothing short of astonishing. It follows two girls and their relationship with drawing, with creativity, with each other. That's the shape of it. But the feeling of it is something else entirely, something that gets right into your chest and stays there. It understands, in a way very few films of any kind manage, what it means to make something, and what it costs.

The artwork stopped me cold within the first few minutes. There's a looseness to it, a roughness in places, that feels completely intentional and completely right. It looks like drawings made by someone who loves drawing, and that's the whole point. You can feel the labour and the love in every frame. It's stunning, genuinely stunning, and I'd use a stronger word if I had one.

Then there's the soundtrack. I'm going to be straight with you: it's one of the best scores I've heard in years. It doesn't push you around or tell you how to feel. It just opens the door and waits. There were moments where the music and the image locked together in a way that made me feel like I'd wandered into something sacred. I know that's a lot, but I mean every word of it.

Now, the detail that I can't stop thinking about. There's a poster visible in the background for Butterfly Effect, and once the story unfolds, you realise that's no accident. The whole film is in conversation with that idea, the agonising question of what changes if you go back, what stays broken, what you'd be willing to give up and what you couldn't bear to lose. The nod is quiet and it's perfect and it made me love the film even more for trusting the audience to catch it. Butterfly Effect is a criminally underrated film, and seeing it referenced here, so deliberately and so cleverly, felt like a little gift.

I've been watching a fair bit of anime recently. I reviewed Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) and Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025), both of which I thought were visually extraordinary in their own right. But Look Back is operating on a different level entirely. Those films dazzle you. This one breaks you open.

What gets me most is how much the film packs into such a compact runtime without ever feeling rushed. It doesn't overstay its welcome. It doesn't pad itself out with subplots or spectacle. It knows exactly what it is and what it wants to say, and it says it with total conviction. That kind of confidence in storytelling is rarer than it should be.

If you're sitting there thinking an hour-long animated film on a streaming service sounds like a light evening, I want to set you straight right now. Have something to do afterwards, something that'll give you a minute to breathe, because you'll need it. This isn't background viewing. It demands your full attention and it earns it completely.

Five stars. Without hesitation. Up there with the best films I've ever watched, animated or otherwise. Please just go and see it.

Rating: ★★★★★ | Year: 2024 | Watched: 2025-04-26

View on Letterboxd →

Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Physical: Amazon US

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