Keiichi Hara 7
Birthday Wonderland
By Andrew Osmond. Keiichi Hara’s feature film Birthday Wonderland plays like a very traditional family fantasy, which seems to be part of its point. Given that the film tells the story of a Japanese girl travelling into a magic world, it inevitably raises thoughts of Spirited Away – which was, among other things, a plea […]
Birthday Wonderland
By Jonathan Clements. Listless and depressed, and desperate to avoid the latest trend-conscious schoolgirl drama at school, Akane (Mayu Matsuoka) feigns an illness, which her mother Midori (Kumiko Aso) seems ready to indulge – it is going to be her birthday soon after all. Instead, she sends the pouting teenager over to Aunt Chii’s junk […]
Visions of Edo
Andrew Osmond takes a step into the past. Thanks to cinema and TV, some long-ago places can feel closer to us than most present-day countries. For British people, one of the closest is Victorian England, specifically Victorian London, home to Dickens dramas, Sherlock mysteries, Martian invasions and the gory mythos of Jack the Ripper. This […]
Miss Hokusai: Keiichi Hara interview
The director of Miss Hokusai talks of his aims and inspirations This film is based on the original manga Sarusuberi by Hinako Sugiura. Could you describe which aspects of the original story were more attractive to you? KEIICHI HARA As a matter of fact, I love all Sugiura’s works, and Sarusuberi in particular. When I […]
Miss Hokusai
By Jonathan Clements. An illustration by Tsuyuki Kocho shows the famous artist Hokusai at work with his assistant, his daughter Oei (or Oi). The picture is dated 1843, only a few years before Hokusai’s death, when he was increasingly reliant on his divorcee daughter to care for him. Hokusai himself is partly obscured, crouching over […]