'Miss Hokusai' Trailer: Artful Animation From Japan

Awards season often brings memorable cinematic portraits of famous artists — think Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner or Ed Harris’s Pollock. This fall, Oscar voters and general audiences will be invited to brush up on their Japanese art history courtesy of Miss Hokusai, the animated feature released in its native country in 2015 and soon to be imported to U.S. screens by perennial Oscar dark horse GKIDS. The film takes an impressionistic approach to the life of celebrated Edo period painter, Katsushika Hokusai and his daughter, O-Ei, who has a rich artistic legacy of her own. Its trailer, which you can watch above, evokes the bold brushstrokes the father and daughter pair brought to their canvases, while also acknowledging some of the personal tensions that marked their relationship.

Director Keiichi Hara, who previously helmed the award-winning 2010 anime feature, Colorful, adapted Miss Hokusai from a manga series that was published in the early ’80s. The film also represents something of a departure for its studio, Production I.G., which is best known as the home for the Ghost in the Shell franchise, a futuristic sci-fi property that encompasses various TV shows, features, and an upcoming live-action adaptation that controversially stars Scarlett Johansson. But Miss Hokusai is right in the wheelhouse of its American distributor: GKIDS has a strong tradition of releasing bold animated fare from around the world and injecting it into the Oscar race for Best Animated Feature, and that’s the goal for Miss Hokusai. Look for it in New York and Los Angeles on Oct. 14 in both its original Japanese cut and a newly dubbed English-language version.