Date: Thursday 15 October 2015
Distributor: Tokyo Theatres Co., Inc. (presented by the Japan Foundation as part of the Japanese Film Festival)
Format: Digital Projection, Japanese dialogue with English subtitles
Length: 90 minutes
Production Date: 2015
Currently on Home Video in English (as of writing): No
It was only a month ago we had the “Love Live!” movie in cinemas. Now this week, from Wednesday to Sunday, the Japanese Film Festival has come to town. It is really a reflection on the current state of Japanese cinema; it’s pretty crap. The vast majority of films screening are live action adaptations of manga or light novels with Jidaigeki films coming a close second, and a small selection of “box office hits” that have had the life wrung out of them by production committees (a group of companies that have a financial stake in the film, who often know nothing about the film making process, but are more than happy to interfere with every aspect of production including the script and casting). Only one independent film made the cut. It’s a pretty abysmal selection of films. Even worse is that in every city the selection of films changes, so if you want to see a specific film, you might have to head to Townsville, Perth or wherever it’s playing.
There are some anime films in the line-up this year. Most annoyingly ”The Case of Hana & Alice”, which I really wanted to see, is only screening in Brisbane, Perth and Sydney. The only anime film to screen here is “Miss Hokusai”. With the Arc cinema at the National Film and Sound Archive operating very infrequently due to federal government funding cuts, the festival is now held at Capitol Cinemas in Manuka. Manuka may be a posh area, but Capitol Cinemas are easily the most unkempt, rundown cinema in all of Canberra. Look, I know it’s the oldest cinema in Canberra, but seriously a renovation is sorely needed. It feels as if nothing has changed in the last decade since I last saw a film there. In fact I don’t think any improvements have been made to the cinema since I moved here some 21 years ago.
I grabbed my ticket and made my way up the old stairs to the cinema 6. Bizarrely there was a table outside the doors with few women in their 70’s milling about with bags. I wasn’t too sure if there were there for some sort of reason to do with the festival or another screening, or if they had commandeered the table for their own purposes. They latter came into the cinema but left soon after. In fact quite a few people came in, realised it was the wrong screening and left. Most of the audience were festival going types with quite a few ex-pat Japanese in the crowd. Otaku types were few and far in-between; a couple of guys, one with a Gatchaman t-shirt (I often seem him around these type of events), a couple in their twenties with the lady wearing a Totoro backpack. In all around 45 to 50 people showed up the screening, which surprised me a bit. A number of adverts ran at the start of the screening, mostly of the festivals sponsors. The Japan National Tourism Organization one was interesting. Apart from the usual clichés (Mount Fuji, Geishas, Shinkansen, the Tokyo skyline with Tokyo Tower etc.) they had a couple of shot of the infamous Robot Restaurant in Kabukicho, Shinjuku. While it was one of my favourite experiences when I when over there a couple of years back, Kabukicho is a red light district, albeit a relatively safe one. Even the rather safe Robot Restaurant feels a little dodgy with its showgirls with Yakuza tats and the doorman who looks like he stepped out of a crime drama.
Finally, after a good ten minutes of adverts, the film began. “Miss Hokusai” tells the story of late Edo period ukiyo-e painter and print maker Katsushika Hokusai, aka Tetsuzo, and his daughter O-Ei. Hokusai, in his mid 50’s in the film, is most famous for the instantly recognisable wood block print “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” as well as “Fine Wind, Clear Morning” aka “South Wind, Clear Sky” or “Red Fuji”, both part of his “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji” series. Set in 1814 in bustling Edo, some 15 years before Tetsuzo created his famous “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji” series, O-Ei, in her early 20’s, and her father live in various run down apartments creating their artwork. While O-Ei is an accomplished artist in her own right, most of the time her work goes uncredited as she plays assistant to her father, who at this point is quite famous. He has many clients across the country and has created many works including giant dharma on a 180 square metre wide sheet of paper, to a pair of sparrows painted on a grain of rice. Hokusai is a workaholic and only paints, eats and sleeps. The pair move out of apartments when rubbish from rejected artwork and remains from brought home meals overwhelms their work/living space. Living with them is a young man named Zenjiro. An alcoholic and ex-samurai, he has taken up ukiyo-e painting, mostly of the erotic kind. Though he is criticised by both O-Ei and her father for lack of originality, he will later become famous for his erotic artwork and prints of beautiful women under the name Keisai Eisen.
Tetsuzo is separated from his wife, whom O-Ei regularly visits. The pair had a child named O-Nao who is now around 6, but was born blind. She is cared for by Buddhist nuns at local temple, however O-Ei regularly visits her for outings. Zenjiro introduces a young and upcoming artist called Kuninao to Tetsuzo. Kuninao hopes Tetsuzo will become his mentor. The trio often had out on the town when Tetsuzo is frustrated with his work. In one such instance, O-Ei accidently ruins a large dragon piece that her father has been working on when ash from her pipe falls on it. With one day until the deadline for the piece to be complete, Tetsuzo blows off his client’s concerns and goes out drinking with Zenjiro and Kuninao. O-Ei ends up completing the work during the night.
The film itself is a series of vignettes, probably due to the fact it is based off an episodic 1980’s manga called “Sarusuberi” by Hinako Sugiura. As a result it’s pretty hard to write up a proper synopsis of the film. After the introduction of the main characters, the audience is treated to a number of mostly unrelated stories. For example O-Ei is commissioned to do a portrait of a courtesan and heads out to do some preliminary sketches with Tetsuzo and Zenjiro in tow. Having heard rumours of the courtesan’s neck growing while she is asleep, Tetsuzo tells the courtesan a story of when his hands used to leave his body and roam around the city. He cured phenomenon by bandaging his hands and placing sutras on them. Intrigued by the story, the courtesan tells the trio to stay for the night and only come to her chamber if they hear a bell being rung. Later than night they hear the bell which is attached to the courtesan’s pillow. They witness her neck twitching and eventually a ghostly apparition of her head and neck separate from her body and flies around the room, though seemingly trapped by the mosquito net canopy surrounding her bed. The courtesan wakes and tells them that the apparition often escapes the canopy and asks if she will need to do the same as Tetsuzo to rid herself of it.
A second story involves more paranormal strangeness as Tetsuzo is asked to help exorcise a panel painting of hell he painted many years ago. It seems to have possessed the lady of the house. The audience is also shown much of O-Ei’s daily life such as her fascination with fires (a common spectacle in the era) and her infatuation with another ukiyo-e painter named Hatsugoro (better known as the famous ukiyo-e artist Totoya Hokkei). In the last part of the film O-Nao becomes deathly ill and moves in with her mother. O-Ei tries to get her father to come visit her, but he seems apathetic towards his younger daughter. O-Nao feels she is the one in the wrong and that somehow she is troubling her father.
As I previously mentioned this film is based on Hinako Sugiura’s manga “Sarusuberi”. Sugiura was quite an interesting woman. Originally an assistant to feminist mangaka, poet and essayist, Murasaki Yamada, she was heavily influenced by the Edo period and researched her Edo period manga in great detail, often illustrating them in an ukiyo-e style. She eventually gave up manga in the early 1990’s in pursuit of research on Edo period lifestyles and customs and wrote several books on the subject. I would suggest her life would make for an equally interesting film as O-Ei’s. Unfortunately the manga isn’t available in English, but I assume the episodic nature of the manga is in part the reason why the film feels a bit disjointed. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It comes off as a kind of “slice of life” type movie; different things happen every day to the main cast. The problem of course is there really is no cohesive narrative to the film. Sure we have the subplot of O-Nao and O-Ei’s family ties, but that’s not quite enough to hold it together. In the end the film just closes as it begins with O-Ei on the Nihonbashi bridge, with text explanations of what happened to the characters after the film. It does feel like a bit of a anti-climax.
The director was Keiichi Hara whose last film, “Colorful”, I absolutely despised. Going through my review of that film from a few years back, well, I can see I didn’t have a fun time watching it; “It’s like a rather sad portrait of a lower middle class family with a ton of problems and their suicidal teenage boy” and my assessment of the film as “sentimental, moralistic trash”. It utterly baffled me that many critics lauded Hara as some sort of brilliant emerging anime director based on this boring, schmaltzy film that looked like it was adapted from a rejected 1980’s telemovie script. As a result I wasn’t really looking forward to “Miss Hokusai”. However as the film progressed, I quite enjoyed it. Like “Colorful”, “Miss Hokusai” focuses on a dysfunctional family, though in this film there is at least a sense of humour in the script, and it doesn’t wallow in cheap sentimentality. I soon realised that “Miss Hokusai” isn’t about a narrative as such. Hara seems more concerned with setting moods in the film than tying all the parts of the separate stories together. As I said before, this isn’t really a bad thing as long as you’re prepared to go along with what Hara is trying to do.
Personally I quite enjoyed the detailed look into Edo in the early 1800’s. There is a lot of lavish detail in not only the physical look of the animation (by Production I.G), but also in the social aspects of its inhabitants. I was rather taken by the spiritual and paranormal elements of everyday life. The visual aspects of the era are also apparent with dream-like sequences being animated in an ukiyo-e style, possibly influenced by the original manga. However the character animation itself looks a little sparse. It’s certainly not as detailed as some TV series. Because of this, it does feel at times the budget was a bit limited. The other slightly problematic aspect of the production is that some of the music feels really out of place. The rock music at the beginning and end sequences of the film clash with the historical setting. However most of the other music fits in with the Edo era and mood of the film. The end credit song by Sheena Ringo, though not fitting in with the period of the film, is quite good and sort matches and segues from the final scene which is a short shot of modern day Tokyo.
As I mentioned previously, one of the core elements of the film is the sibling relationship between O-Nao and O-Ei. There’s quite a number of charming sequences which show off their close relationship, with O-Ei vividly describing their surroundings to the blind O-Nao. A couple of scenes have O-Nao exploring her world via sound and touch, which is not something you usually see in anime. It’s all these little moments which make the film work as opposed to an ongoing narrative you’d have in a normally structured film. O-Ei is certainly the most interesting character in the film. She generally doesn't take nonsense from anyone. For example she criticises Zenjiro for his lack of originality and nicknames him "brazen" because of it. She seems quite independent at times, but others quite vulnerable. Her crush on Hatsugoro is one of the more interesting elements of her character that I sort of wish was explored a bit more. It is rather interesting that the men are portrayed as mostly no good bums. I’m assuming this is partly because of manga author Hinako Sugiura’s feminist background.
One of the biggest problems to a non-Japanese audience is the film assumes that you have previous knowledge of Hokusai’s work. A scene involving O-Nao and O-Ei on a boat makes a visual reference to “The Great Wave off Kanagawa”, but nowhere in the film, not even in the “what happened to them afterwards” on screen explanations at the end of the film, is it explained what impact Hokusai’s work had. I also think that the fact O-Ei was an underrated and uncredited artist is also somewhat glossed over (or more accurately, underemphasised) in the film. What did surprise me though was that a lot of the material in the film did actually happen and is supported by historical documents. Unfortunately this is not mentioned in the film and only way you’d find out about this is if you researched her life story yourself.
As I left the cinema, there were a bunch of volunteers from the Japan Foundation, standing and grinning right outside, holding boxes where you could put your completed survey into (of which one wasn’t given to me before I went in…). I found this as bit strange and weird as you were just confronted with these people with almost no explanation as you walked out the door. I had no idea who they were at first. Maybe the Foundation could just put a box outside and be done with it. There were at least half a dozen people collecting surveys, which was overkill.
Anyway, in conclusion it’s a pretty good film. The lack of a cohesive narrative lets the film down a little bit. But if you just go with the flow of the film and understand that it just follows a certain period of O-Ei and her father’s life, you’ll probably enjoy it. Two things of note before I finish; this is the third time one of Keiichi Hara’s films has screened theatrically in Canberra (the previous two were “Colorful” in 2010 and “Summer Days with Coo” in 2009, which I unfortunately didn’t get to see), yet none of his films are available on home video in this country. Also currently the only English language distributor for this film is All the Anime/Anime Limited in the UK which is a bit of a shame. I was going to give it .5 less, but on balance I really think this film deserves a 7 out of 10.
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