Miss Hokusai (2015) on Netflix

PG-1320151h 33mAnimation Biography Drama

In Edo, O-Ei is the daughter and eager apprentice of Tetsuzo, the artist known as Hokusai. She shares his talent and his passion, and her work goes out under his name.

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Netflix4.0/5
IMDb6.7/103,768 votes
Rotten Tomatoes93%

Trailer

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Plot summary

Tetsuzo, a master woodblock painter in Edo, works under the pen name Hokusai. The year is 1814. His daughter, O-Ei, is a masterful painter herself, an eager apprentice who shares his talent and his passion and spends most of her time assisting him. She is nearing adulthood and lives in his shadow. Tetsuzo is divorced, gives himself almost entirely to his art, and has little attention left for the world or for O-Nao, his young daughter, who is blind. Prints that leave the house, dragons and shunga among them, carry his name rather than hers. O-Ei paints beside him and means to be known for her own work.

Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Miss Hokusai (2015)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

Two scenes in the film use rock music with electric guitars, sounds deliberately anachronistic for the Edo period, to present O-Ei's personality; Keiichi Hara took the idea from Hinako Sugiura, the manga's author, who liked to draw while listening to rock.
The manga the film adapts is a series of tales with no narrative continuity between them, each centred on a different character; to bring so many different elements together, Keiichi Hara focused on O-Ei and her relationship with her little sister O-Nao, family ties giving the whole film its coherence.
Some scenes were invented for the film, including O-Nao playing in the snow and the ending; because little is known about the real O-Ei, Keiichi Hara had a certain freedom in handling her character, though he based it heavily on the manga.
Keiichi Hara already knew Sarusuberi, the manga by Hinako Sugiura that the film adapts, and had drawn inspiration from it in his earlier films, notably for a dragon that appears in Un été avec Coo.
To recreate the Edo period in which the characters live, the film's sound design was built to evoke wooden floors and wooden shoes and the rustling of kimonos.