Miss Hokusai (2015)
is an animated film following the fictionalized life of O-Ei, the daughter of Tetsuzo
(the great artist known as Hokusai or “The Old Man Mad about Painting”) and
takes place in 1814 Japan, during the Edo Period. She is a young painter
herself and trying to improve her style while living and working with her
father, who has a very great reputation (you’ve probably seen a copy of his ‘The
Great Wave off Kanagawa’) but who cares little for fame or money, but only about
perfecting his art. This is reflected in their living quarters, one in a series
of shabby little studios, which, as they fill up with the detritus of their
living, they can abandon and move on to cleaner apartments. “With two brushes
and four chopsticks,” she claims, “We can live anywhere.”
Hokusai has divorced O-Ei’s
mother to further concentrate on his art, but their relationship remains
cordial. What concerns ‘Miss Hokusai’ more is his avoidance of his younger
daughter, a little girl born blind. O-Ei puts this down to his fear of
sickness, but as the story progresses there are hints that he believes he might
be responsible for her lack of sight as karma for his superior artistic vision,
and that he avoids the child out of guilt. O-Ei tries to make it up to the girl
with loving attention and teaching but the child’s health continues to fail.
Meanwhile, ‘Miss Hokusai’
struggles with a perceived flaw in her painting. Although her style is so good
that she can often finish Hokusai’s work without detection by casual viewers,
many of her fellow artists see her depictions of male figures are weak. The
general consensus is that she needs to take a lover. There are three contenders
in the arena: a somewhat weedy protégé of her father’s who often visits the
studio and specializes in erotic art has an interest in her (she doesn’t
respect his work and outright ridicules him); a rising young artist whom she
meets by accident on a bridge who pursues her like an awkward puppy; and a
mature, smooth, established artist, kind but somewhat distant, who ties her
tongue whenever she is in his presence. She even visits a brothel to try to
solve her ‘problem’, but an encounter with a genial but single-minded male
transvestite ends in something of an unfulfilling stalemate.
Besides these personal
through-lines, there is a string of vignettes, a set of stories that emphasize
the visionary, almost priest-like nature of Hokusai’s talent. He and his
daughter live in an atmosphere of fire and shadow, where dragons, demons and
ghosts move in and out of paintings and haunt the ‘real world’. O-Ei watches
and learns as Hokusai solves spiritual problems with neither spells nor advice,
but with talent and insight. The melancholy denouement of the film is a poignant
weaving of the supernatural and the personal.
I first saw this movie on
Netflix and knew I would like to have a copy. It has no insistent story but is
made up of a series of quietly engaging scenes that add up to a single picture,
like an Impressionist artwork or the many brush strokes of a Japanese painting.
In the end it is gently satisfying and beautiful, and I have fallen in love
with ‘Miss Hokusai’.
