“We don’t cook. We don’t clean. It gets too dirty, we move,” says O-Ei in the new trailer for “Miss Hokusai.” Instead, she and her father, a famous artist, spend countless hours painting and drawing, so that she may learn to become her own artist.
Directed by Keiichi Hara (“Colorful”), and from GKIDS studio and Japanese company Production I.G (creators of “Ghost in the Shell”), “Miss Hokusai,” tells O-Ei’s coming-of-age story, and particularly her evolution as an artist. A press release details, “As all of Edo flocks to see the work of the revered painter Hokusai, his daughter O-Ei toils diligently inside his studio. Her masterful portraits, dragons, and erotic sketches — sold under the name of her father — are coveted by upper crust Lords and journeyman print makers alike. Shy and reserved in public, in the studio O-Ei is as brash and uninhibited as her father, smoking a pipe while sketching drawings that would make contemporary Japanese ladies blush. But despite this fiercely independent spirit, O-Ei struggles under the domineering influence of her father and is ridiculed for lacking the life experience that she is attempting to portray in her art.”
You’re actually probably familiar with Katsushika Hokusai’s most famous work, “The Great Wave Off the Coast of Kanagawa,” but, as Variety wrote in a review of the film, “The annals of Western art are woefully sparse when it comes to female painters, which is just one of perhaps a dozen reasons that ‘Miss Hokusai’ comes as such a refreshing anomaly among anime exports.”
“Miss Hokusai” is adapted from “ Sarusuberi,” a manga created by women, and features a female screenwriter, Miho Maruo.
“Miss Hokusai” hits theater in the U.S. on October 14. Watch the beautiful trailer below.