'Miss Hokusai,' The Daughter Of A Master Artist

If Astroboy creator Osamu Tezuka is the father of anime, its great-uncle is Edo-period artist Katsushika Hokusai. He's best known for The Great Wave off Kanagawa, the most-reproduced Japanese artwork. The story is about an exploration of the life of Japanese painter O-Ei Hokusai.

Her modest fame is eclipsed by that of her father, Hokusai, who also went by the name Tetsuzo and whose most famous work, The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, continues to move viewers.This is not anime for fanboys who crave intergalactic battles, mutinous cyborgs, and buxom nymphets, although it does include a few fantasy sequences. The movie is domestic in scale, and focused on daily life in Edo (now Tokyo).

The film was adapted from a 1980s manga series that treated O'Ei's life as a succession of vignettes, not a plot-driven conjectural biography.The stories are told with bold, coherent graphics and buoyed by music that’s sometimes anachronistic (loud guitar rock brackets the movie) but always right. O-Ei is voiced with sensitivity and confidence by Anne Watanabe, daughter of the actor Ken Watanabe, and all of the other voice roles are beautifully done. While it’s not entirely kid-friendly, this portrait of an artist is both enchanting and thought provoking. 

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