GKIds Acquires Production I.G.’s “Miss Hokusai”

GKIds Acquires Production I.G.’s “Miss Hokusai”

July 7th, 2016

Jerry Beck

GKIDS has announced it has acquired distribution rights to Miss Hokusai, the latest feature from Japanese animation powerhouse Production I. G. (Ghost In The Shell, A Letter To Momo).

The film by renowned director Keiichi Hara (Colorful) took home the Jury Prize at the Annecy Film Festival, swept the top jury and audience awards at Fantasia Film Festival, and won Best Animated Feature at Sitges and Best Animated Feature at the Asia Pacifica Screen Awards, among others. Miss Hokusai has received glowing reviews from critics on the festival circuit.

The film will be released October 14th in New York and Los Angeles prior to a North American expansion.

Adapted from Hinako Sugiura’s manga Sarusuberi by Miho Maruo (both of whom are women), Miss Hokusai is the untold story of O-Ei, the daughter and artistic collaborator of Katsushika Hokusai, arguably Japan’s greatest artist. Set in Edo period Japan, the film portrays O-Ei’s coming of age as a young woman, as she struggles with her identity as an artist, her emerging sexuality, and the search for the sublime through art.

GKIDS previously distributed Production I.G’s A Letter To Momo.

SYNOPSIS
As all of Edo flocks to see the work of the famous painter Hokusai, his daughter O-Ei toils diligently inside his studio, unknown to the public. Her masterful portraits, dragons and erotic sketches – sold under the name of her father – are coveted by upper crust Lords and journeyman print makers alike. In public, O-Ei knows and respects “her place,” but at home in the studio, she’s as brash and uninhibited as her father, smoking a pipe while sketching erotic drawings that would make contemporary Japanese ladies blush. But despite her talent and fiercely independent spirit, O-Ei struggles under the domineering influence of her father and is ridiculed for lacking the life experience that she is attempting to portray in her art. Miss Hokusai’s lively Edo (present day Tokyo) is filled with yokai spirits, dragons, and conniving tradesmen, while O-Ei’s relationships with her famously impetuous father and blind younger sister provide a powerful emotional underpinning to this rollicking and sumptuously-animated feminist coming-of-age tale.

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Jerry Beck

Writer, cartoon producer and author of more than 15 books on animation history. A former studio exec with Nickelodeon and Disney; currently on the faculty at both CalArts in Valencia and Woodbury University in Burbank, California.