As someone who came of age during the back-to-back global phenomena of Dragon Ball Z and Naruto, my exposure to manga is largely confined to the true breakout cross-cultural megahits—which is to say, I had heard of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Chainsaw Man (and even watched an episode of its anime adaptation) but not his coming-of-age drama one-shot Look Back. In just 58 minutes, writer-director Kiyotaka Oshiyama adapts Fujimoto’s critically acclaimed 143-page web-manga without a second of padding, cutting right to the heart of its beautiful depiction of the toilsome life of an artist and how they find meaning in their creations.

The story follows Ayumu Fujino (voiced by Yuumi Kawai), an elementary school student who draws four-panel manga for her school’s paper, to the delight and admiration of her fellow classmates. Fujino maintains a nonchalant attitude about her talents, downplaying the effort she puts into her art—a lie I told countless times as a kid who relished the praise showered upon his drawings. But every young artist has a moment when they are thrown into a bigger pond with much bigger fish and are forced to face the fact that they can no longer believe the hype fueled by their friends and family. For Fujino, this moment comes when her teacher asks her to share her newspaper column with Kyomoto (voiced by Mizuki Yoshida), a younger, agoraphobic shut-in who somehow maintains her status as a student despite never coming to school.

Kyomoto’s manga is good—so good that it both robs Fujino of her classroom celebrity and lights a competitive fire within her to improve her skills. Try as she might, though, Fujino simply can’t surpass the detailed, photorealistic backgrounds at which Kyomoto excels. Tired of losing friends and experiences to her pursuit of being a better illustrator, Fujino throws in the towel, accepting defeat—a decision that stung this lapsed artist who once lived inside his sketchbook. Fujino resigns herself to being a “normal” kid and enjoys the fruits of a social life that can’t be had when you spend all day with graphite smears on your hands. However, when Fujino is tasked with delivering Kyomoto’s diploma, a fateful in-person encounter with her reclusive rival reignites her artistic drive.

In a twist of irony, Kyomoto reveals herself to be Fujino’s number one fan, even going so far as to request that the girl who gave up drawing because of her sign the back of her kimono. Never one to show her cards, Fujino plays off her shock at Kyomoto’s fandom and claims that she will soon be entering a manga contest, despite having sworn off her passion for some time. Kyomoto is ecstatic, desperate to see her favorite artist’s new work as soon as possible. Through the power of montage, we see the two girls team up and spend years working together on multiple manga one-shots, many of which receive not only publication but high praise.

Their partnership extends beyond their creations. Fujino helps Kyomoto acclimate to the outside world—a delightful sequence depicts the two taking a trip into the city to splurge with their manga earnings and see their work on store shelves—while Kyomoto’s intricate backgrounds add depth to Fujino’s lively animated foregrounds (a sentiment mirrored in the very animation of the film). Through it all, Fujino maintains the belief that she is the superior artist, never letting her partner know the true value of her work. This makes Kyomoto’s decision to break up the band all the more painful. Wanting to live a life of her own and grow as an artist, Kyomoto declines to join Fujino when the offer of a serialized manga comes along, choosing instead to pursue a formal education in art.

What follows is an affecting mix of real-world-inspired tragedy and the kind of fantastical revisionism that only art can provide; wounds healed through creation—Look Back’s core thesis. This is undoubtedly a personal story for Fujimoto—hell, if you combine the names of Fujino and Kyomoto, you literally get their creator’s name. The plight of a manga artist is well documented, with endless stories of industry titans facing missed deadlines and burnout, and the story captures why one would choose to roll that metaphorical boulder up the hill despite the lifestyle it demands. But in adapting a manga that has little need for fluid movement, the question becomes, why adapt it?

It’s a question Oshiyama poses himself in the Q&A attached to screenings of the film—mercifully taking place after the film, thus allowing the creators to actually talk about the movie you’ve just seen rather than the pointless pre-movie Q&As where creators have to talk around the movie you’re about to see. The answer Oshiyama seems to have landed on is emphasizing the importance of the work of artists in a world that we all fear will soon turn to AI to generate its art. Oshiyama stressed the importance of the human choices that affected the film, and the story he’s adapting underscores why a soulless computer will never be able to create great art: because it has no one to create it for.

In principle, I agree with everything Look Back stands for, and in theory, it should be quite moving, but in practice, the film’s fleeting runtime almost handicaps its emotional potential. The story is almost over before you have time to get invested in it. In a world that bemoans the current average movie runtime of two and a half hours, Look Back almost demands to be longer. Padding out the runtime is common practice in anime, as most serialized manga adaptations have dozens, sometimes hundreds, of filler episodes to give the manga time to come out. The few anime I’ve watched particularly suffer from this practice, as the egregious amount of Naruto filler has been a hurdle too high to clear on multiple failed rewatch attempts. Oshiyama’s strict by-the-book translation to the screen is commendable, but ultimately, it proves to be a glance too brief. A longer observation would have undeniably led to teary eyes, but as it stands, Look Back is just a quick glimpse at greatness.