They say you should write about what you know, but it doesn’t hurt to extrapolate. Shoichi Morimoto drew on his many years of experience working as an assistant director — including on multiple films by Hirokazu Koreeda — when writing the screenplay for his debut feature, co-directed with Takuma Sato (“Any Crybabies Around?”). However, rather than yet another movie about making a movie, “The Potentials” shifts the setting to the world of manga.
In the process, Morimoto and Sato have created a quirky counterpart to Koreeda’s recent “Look Back.” But while that film’s characters were just embarking on a career in comics, the protagonist of “The Potentials” is several decades further down the road — even if it’s hard to say he’s made much progress.
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