Ukiyo-e master Katsushika Hokusai is one of Japan's best-known artists. His print "The Great Wave off Kanagawa," with its giant blue wave curling over a tiny Mount Fuji, is seen on T-shirts and coffee mugs around the world. Given his multifarious talent, vast energy and long life — Hokusai died in Tokyo (then called Edo) at age 88 in 1849 — I had long thought of him as a Japanese Picasso.
But as Keiichi Hara's new animated feature "Sarusuberi" ("Miss Hokusai") makes clear in scene after gorgeously illustrated scene, he resembled the Spanish master in another way: his vexed relationships with his offspring, particularly his 23-year-old daughter, O-Ei (voiced by the single-named Anne), the "Miss Hokusai" of the English title.
Based on Hinako Sugiura's carefully researched 1983-87 manga, the film focuses on the period when O-Ei was serving as her father's assistant — and coming into her own as both an artist and a woman. Their life together, as the film shows with the manga's dry humor, is hardly conventional. Hokusai (Yutaka Matsushige) is regally unconcerned with housekeeping and O-Ei is coolly disinclined to serve as a surrogate wife for the man she calls "Tetsuzo." So they live in paper-strewn squalor with a menagerie that includes a cute dog and a talkative young disciple, Zenjiro (Gaku Hamada), who would rather carouse than buckle down to work. And so occasionally would Hokusai, much to O-Ei's disgust.