Metacritic reviews

While it’s not entirely kid-friendly, this portrait of an artist is both enchanting and thought provoking.

It condenses everyday interactions, memories, and dreams into a potent mix of all the major ingredients of a well-lived life.

One of the ways this film feels fresh and revisionist is that it doesn’t succumb to “great man”-ism, positioning a famous artist’s genius as singular.

Hara marries biography to observational and slapstick humor, plus a healthy dose of supernatural rumblings, and in so doing produces something altogether fascinating and endlessly entertaining.

If some anime films also feature more painterly details in the backdrops, especially when depicting nature, what feels new here is the attention to details such as the glow of light sources, including candles and lanterns, that are warmer and more realistically detailed than usual.

Magical and melancholy, tender and robust: rippling reserves of theme and style compensate for wobbly pacing in Keiichi Hara’s adaptation of Hinako Sugiura’s manga Sarusuberi.

Animation proves the ideal medium for Miss Hokusai’s relatively tame story, allowing audiences to admire the family’s artwork within a world that they were partially responsible for creating.

Miss Hokusai surprises us with its different emotional tones, ranging from the sinister and supernatural to the unapologetically sexual and the sweetly sentimental.

Keiichi Hara's episodic anime Miss Hokusai is a lovely biopic, even if it never quite picks up and focuses on a single thread. (Then again, neither does life.)

It is an interesting work, delicately and discreetly animated, with a quiet visual coup in its final moments.