This is a real frame from Look Back (2024).
You might assume this made it into the final movie because of its director Kiyotaka Oshiyama (押山清高) doing HALF the key animation for the film and only fully finishing it A WEEK before it's festival debut.
And well, you might be partially right about that. But more importantly, this is the movie embodying its themes through its unconventional production process and the very lines on the screen!
In an age of digital tools, CGI, AI, and other combinations of letters ending in I, Look Back is an ode to art and the labor that goes into it, no matter how tedious or imperfect.
Every thought, every little decision, every stroke made by a person puts a little piece of that person onto the screen, and the imperfections that come from that process can be beautiful in the sense that they're evidence of the thoughts and process that went into creating an image. So in keeping with the plot of the movie itself, Oshiyama made a point of leaving those remnants - lines that are scratchy, overlapping, or half-erased, and normally would have been cleaned up in 2nd key animation (第二原画).
Ayumu Fujino has a tight grip on how she expresses herself, having this image to uphold as the perfect prodigy girl. She's afraid to let people see too much of her, lest that perfect image be shattered.
But at times the mask does slip, like this moment of sheer panic after she accidentally drops what is really an extremely rude manga strip under her rival's door by accident.
And it's these moments when that rough imperfection shines through the most! So this breakdown of polish in the art functions simultaneously as both a connection to the human labor that went into creating it, AND an impressionistic representation of Fujino's mental state within the world of the movie.
Not only are the edges of her backpack visible through her arm, her face even disappears completely, replaced by just the roughly sketched dividing lines that indicate the position of her eyes. At least personally, I never would have noticed this fully unfinished frame at full speed because the shot is just so well-executed! The framing is dramatic with Fujino surrounded by these mountains of sketchbooks in the foreground, and the motion is so believable, her posture - hunched over to the side to support the weight of the bag while maneuvering around the books, and the way her legs twirl around each other frantically, rotating this way and that.
But more importantly, this is a frame that an AI program would never draw, because it has no REASON to. There's no thought process, no decisions being made about how to express a feeling. Even if you did train an AI specifically to mimic these human imperfections, in Oshiyama's words, "It would just be a design. It would be a fake. The lines have meaning because they were drawn by humans. […] There's value in that." (MANTANWEB)
This is an adapted excerpt from this video! Go watch it or I'll dox you.
