Forum - View topicREVIEW: Miss Hokusai BD+DVD
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Angel M Cazares
 Posts: 5506 Location: Iscandar |
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Miss Hokusai is my favorite anime film from the past 3 years. I really like it because it is a film about very specific moments in life that have some kind of deep spiritual meaning. I like well constructed narratives, but in this case O-Ei and a few of the other characters offered things that kept me engaged throughout the movie.
I am glad someone released Miss Hokusai in BD and with a dub, which is a pleasing addition to me. I feel that this movie flew under the radar, but I am very glad it got licensed and released. |
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Lemonchest
Posts: 1771 |
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Tbh I found Miss Hokusai boring, aimless (pointless) & felt a lot longer than it's 90 minute runtime. Subplots get teased but never developed. It's vignettes aren't connected by theme or mood despite attempts to loosly tie everything around her little sister's impending death - a subject handled with all the grace & subtlety of a car crash. The mid section turns into scooby doo as the gang go around solving mysteries tied to paintings because we gotta get to 90 minutes. Even felt more like a 3 episode OVA than a film, with scenes ending on a cliffhanger & a fade to black every 20-30 minutes.
Looked pretty, though. Reminded me a bit of Our Little Sister, in that it's a neat premise & sets up a whole bunch of potential plot points at the beginning, only to spend the rest of the runtime wallowing in its own existence before pulling a conclusion out of its arse. |
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AholePony
 Posts: 330 Location: Arizona |
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I loved this movie, the way it's structured may seem odd but it seems to be fairly common in Japanese cinema to feel like a series of short stories. I got my parents to watch this one and they both loved it too.
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Merida
 Posts: 1946 |
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Loved it, i wasn't bothered by the structure at all but found it fairly intriguing. I've had a copy of The Great wave of Kanagawa on my wall for quite some time, so it was nice to get a bit more background info on the artist and the time period.
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Zhou-BR
Posts: 1461 |
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The movie's disjointedness weirded me out a bit, but I still enjoyed it. It reminded me of some of Isao Takahata's latter work that dispensed with the usual 3-act structure we've come to expect from movies.
What really surprised me was the "making of" documentary, which ran about 20 minutes longer than the movie itself. It reveals that director Keiichi Hara had a bout of depression that went on for months and almost led him to abandon the project, and character designer/animator director Yoshimi Itazu and assistant director Masako Sato essentially co-directed the movie during his absence from day-to-day production. Thankfully, he had already completed about 80% of the storyboards before taking that long break, and he came back in time to finish the movie. |
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relyat08
 Posts: 4125 Location: Northern Virginia |
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Coming from someone who finds character dramas, particularly ones that are just about living life, incredibly compelling, this movie did not work for me at all. I thought it failed at more or less everything that it attempted to do. The vignettes were generally pretty boring, somewhat aimless, and very awkwardly edited together. O-Ei herself was not particularly compelling to me either, for whatever reason. Oh, and I hated the music. It was completely jarring and incongruous with the tone that I thought the film was going for. For starters there are very few moments any sort of rock music would've seemed appropriate in this film, and the moment that Nick alluded to was certainly not one of them.
I enjoyed the animation for the most part, and I particularly adored the scene where her little sister is playing in the snow, but other than that, I was pretty disappointed with this film. |
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GeorgeC
Posts: 795 |
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WHY is the review of the Blu ray release just coming now six weeks after it's been available?!?
This was one of the bigger anime releases of the year. What'sa matter, guys? Was the fact that this film was released in Wal-Mart that big a deal to you? The review should have been posted the week the film was released on home video! (I'm slightly more puzzled by one Amazon.com review by a guy who bought a cheap, [I'm sure] region-free, questionably-legal DVD copy of the film because he refused to wait and buy the OFFICIAL, LEGAL Blu ray copy of the film for an additional $5 more. (He posted that comment maybe 2 or 3 weeks before the official US Blu ray release. (Just when I think I can't be surprised anymore, anime fans show me up and prove once again they're the most idiosyncratic group of fanboys and fangirls.) This is one of the animated films I've enjoyed BETTER than many in theaters in a long, long while. I had to buy this film on Blu ray the first day. It was definitely a must-buy for me after the limited theatrical engagement in the US. I'll probably watch it for a third time before the end of the year. Miss Hokusai also has one of the more revealing, behind the scenes making of documentaries I've seen in a while. I never expected a documentary like that coming out of Japan. The documentary of the "making of" is actually longer than the finished movie! I'm fairly certain, though, had the director of Miss Hokusai pulled something like that in the US on an American movie that was financed by a major production studio he would have been pulled off the film and replaced... I'm fairly certain he would have been unofficially blacklisted or the major studios would have been reluctant to work with him after he pulled that stunt, depression or no depression. I'm not condemning him, btw. I'm just stating facts for people who post on this site and don't want to deal with reality. I'm glad the director finished the film. I'm just surprised to hear he didn't suffer major career repercussions from it but maybe the anime industry is even more different than I thought. Anyhow, the lack of a direct A-B-C route to this film wasn't a big deal for me. It's nice sometimes not to have a film go in a direct path and pre-chew, pre-digest every plot point to you. I've had enough of that from Hollywood. Just because an occasional film IS episodic doesn't ruin the experience for me. It just depends on how well the film's orchestrated. There was an animated Batman film released last year that was also episodic but between Miss Hokusai and that film Hokusai handled its episodic issues MUCH better. I really wanted to like that other film but it just wasn't made particularly well. |
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relyat08
Posts: 4125 Location: Northern Virginia |
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What? Among whom exactly was this one of the bigger releases of the year? Certainly not among anyone I know. Nor many people at all within the anime fandom community in general. Nor among people who follow movies. In fact, I'd say this is actually one of the smaller releases of the year by nearly any metric. Something that I am surprised got released at all. I only hope it's successful enough that we are able to get other niche movies released over here, like Giovanni's Island and Magical Sisters Yoyo and Nene. |
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Jayhosh
 Posts: 972 Location: Millmont, Pennsylvania |
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I thought the film's animation and art were really impressive. Comparisons to Takahata's style of filmmaking are totally understandable. It's like Takahata-lite, but that's not really a bad thing. I thought the insert of rock music was jarring at first, but I think it adds to the films sort of post-modern "empowerment" vibe it was going for. The English dub was also really solid. It's a GKIDS release after all, which I'm used to being a cut above the rest at this point. I wish they would dub all anime films honestly (they would have done a far better service to Your Name than whatever studio Funimation got to to dub it did, but I digress).
Also, that one guy who wrote an essay complaining about Walmart or whatever really needs to knock himself down a peg before he has a stroke. |
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yuna49
 Posts: 3804 |
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I enjoyed Miss Hokusai though I was not "wowed" by it. Still I just ordered the BD because I want to watch the extra about the production methods. Sounds quite interesting.
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relyat08
Posts: 4125 Location: Northern Virginia |
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Yeah, thinking about getting it for that reason as well. I'm always interested in anime production content wherever I can get it. And I'd like to just support this kind of film. I wasn't a huge fan of this one, as I noted, but I am in the market for this kind of stuff, and want more to come out. |
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yuna49
Posts: 3804 |
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One of my favorite such extras is the tour of Hakodate that accompanies Noein. In it, director Akane Kazuki and principal actress Kudo Haruka visit the locations that appear in the anime. There's also a funny moment when Akane comments about Kudo using a word that could have been "kowaii" ("afraid") or "kawaii" ("cute"). The English translator chose the former, though perhaps Akane meant the latter.
At one point Haruka the seiyuu sits at a desk much like the one belonging to Haruka the character. 
I believe the similarity in hair styles is not accidental. This segment has been uploaded to YouTube but without subtitles. |
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relyat08
Posts: 4125 Location: Northern Virginia |
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That's also one of my favorites. I'm pretty into sakuga as well, and the Noein release also comes with a production breakdown for several pieces of animation, from the first key animation stage, the in-betweens, and then completed. And states the animators who worked on it as well. It's a very cool extra. Both of those are. I can't say I remember that kowai/kawaii mess up, lol, but it's been a little while since I saw that. I thought the conversations between the two of them were really awesome though. And I could totally see Haruka being based slightly off of Haruka. lol
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Raebo101
 Posts: 813 |
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That's funny, because NYAV Post dubbed both Miss Hokusai and Your Name. Same voice directors, too (Michael Sinterniklaas and Stephanie Sheh). Also, Funimation didn't commission the dub for Your Name, Anime Limited did; Funimation just licensed the film for North Amertica. GKIDS does not produce dubs, they distribute them. |
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yuna49
Posts: 3804 |
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I just watched the production video. It largely focused on the interactions of the staff and the problems created by the sudden departure of the director for about four months. I was hoping to see more of the actual production techniques, particularly things like key frames and in-betweening, colorization, and the like. We mostly see the storyboarding, character design, and drawings by the animators, but not so much on how all the pieces are assembled into a flowing animated work.
I was a bit surprised that the voice acting all happened in post-production. I thought that movies, with their larger budgets, tended to use the "voices-first" model with the actors working in an ensemble. (Among anime made for television, Kurenai is a good example of this method.) It's apparently more expensive for the illustrators to match mouth flaps to an existing sound track than vice versa, which is why it is rarely used for anime made for television. There was one quite interesting segment with Anne Watanabe, the voice of O-Ei, where the director asks her to perform the opening narration with a number of different voicings and intonations. The scene near the end where, during the final run-through, the director asks the paint department to remove the socks on Hokusai's feet showed the sort of attention to detail that only a creator would care about. I'm sure 99% of the audience would never have noticed that Hokusai was wearing socks in that scene but not in others. |
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