Miss Hokusai (Keiichi Hara)

[Philip J. Fry]

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[Philip J. Fry]

Miss Hokusai.

Keiichi Hara, 2015.

Synopsis: Katsushika Hokusai's art works and ukiyo-e paintings have been always almost synonymous with Japanese culture and his works have influenced countless, from Renoir to Anime, however, he wouldn't have been able to be as prolific without his daughter, Katsushika O-Ei. This is her story.

What did I like? It would've been a damn shame if a movie about painting and art would've looked like Family Guy. Good things this is not the case since it looks spectacular and has some great shout outs to Hokusai's paintings. There were also some vignettes that had a good amount of poignancy, specially when it dealt with Hosukai's other daughter, a young blind girl named O-Nao.

What didn't I like? From what wiki says, the original manga was mostly a few loosely-connected stories and it shows because this story is very, very episodic and most of the time feels lacking focus: Sometimes is about O-Ei's difficult relation with her father, sometimes about her perceived flaws as an artist, her love life, the relationship between them and O-Nao and in the middle there's something about superstitions, dreams and ghosts. At the end I think it would've been better for Hara to focus in one single aspect of them and go more in depth.

Final thoughts: Great looking movie, suffers the biopic syndrome. Still, worth a shot if you like animation.

[Stay Puft]

There were also some vignettes that had a good amount of poignancy, specially when it dealt with Hosukai's other daughter, a young blind girl named O-Nao.

Yeah, the scenes with O-Ei and O-Nao were wonderful. Easily my favorite parts of the whole film.

For "What didn't I like?" I would also add the CGI. I generally liked it when the movie switched animation styles to reference Hokusai's paintings, as you discussed, but I found the integration and use of CGI in some scenes to kinda go flying in the face of that and was a bit distracting. There were a couple music cues that didn't work for me, either. The film has this subtle but strange modern approach/perspective in its aesthetics that gets blatant in the coda and I'm not really sure how I was supposed to react to that. Honestly, I'd love this film if it was just about O-Ei and O-Nao's relationship (and the larger family, by extention) and cut out the rest of the stuff.

A pleasant viewing experience overall, though. The above criticisms are basically nitpicks. The film has a tenderness and beauty to it that far outweighs what I thought were some questionable or inexplicable artistic choices.

[number8]

You pretty much got it. This is way too segmented. I'm not sure what exactly it's trying to say with them collectively. There's no subtext about her living under her dad's shadow or her supposedly finishing his work for him. There's an interesting mention of her difficulty drawing eroticism, and that doesn't really go anywhere.

There are some interesting vignettes, though.

[Peng]

This is a weird one. It undercuts its own potentially cliche approach, both to an anime and to a biopic genre, at every turn (one high tragic point is quickly skipped over, and its first signifer is then repeated for comedic effect almost in the next scene), often to faintly enervating feeling of slightness, but also often to amusingly deadpan and refreshingly nonchalant digressions as well. It's a trickly balance that I'm not sure the film pulls off successfully, but it's certainly interesting. 6.5/10