Miss Hokusai, the next project from anime studio Production I.G – the makers of Ghost in the Shell – brings to the big screen the works of an artist you may not know by name, though you likely would recognize his work: Katsushika Hokusai, 19th century Japanese painter and printmaker known for his depictions of courtesans, kabuki, and the iconic image of waves surrounding Mount Fuji.
The lead of Miss Hokusai, though, is not Katsushika Hokusai himself but his daughter, O-Ei, who was a painter in her own right. The film, which opens in select U.S. theaters this Friday, is based on a 1980s manga series of the same title.
Told in a series of vignettes, Miss Hokusai primarily focuses on O-Ei”s relationships with her father and her young, blind sister, though there is a small love interest storyline in the film.
O-Ei tends to be far more absorbed in studying and painting the beauty of other women than in her own primping, but at one point in the film, when she”s about to encounter this love interest at a kabuki show, O-Ei takes a moment to apply some brush strokes to her own skin and carefully places a kushi (an ornamental comb) in her hair – much to the bewilderment of Zenjiro (her father”s friend, a frequently drunk painter) and the family dog. Check out the moment in the HitFix-exclusive clip below: