Katsushika Hokusai is the Japanese artist whose famous work is The Great Wave Off Kanagawa (1830): an elegant and mysterious vision of a huge wave in mid-break, droplets of spray fixed like icicles, endlessly reproduced on T-shirts, posters, etc. This interesting and unexpectedly complex anime, based on Hinako Sugiura’s manga series Sarusaberi, or Crape Myrtle, is about Hokusai’s daughter and assistant O-Ei, voiced by Anne Watanabe.
The movie persuasively speculates that she was effectively his collaborator and artistic co-creator, and the film combines the sentimental, the erotic and the simply strange. Father and daughter here have a very frank attitude to their lucrative erotica output, and there are intriguing leftfield moments, such as a visit to a courtesan, who is tricked into revealing her mystical ability to let her head float away from her neck. O-Ei has a bizarre vision of a giant Buddha appearing in the sky and letting its great foot stamp on her. There is a nod to the famous wave.
It is an interesting work, delicately and discreetly animated, with a quiet visual coup in its final moments when the Edo (as it was then called) of 1814 is dreamily replaced by the Tokyo of the 21st century.
