The animation is lovely and I really like the main character, but that's about all there is to Miss Hokusai. It's a story about some Tokugawa-period layabout artists going around Edo doing art stuff, kind of vague slice-of-life material and inspiration for real-life art done by these characters. It's a bit like the 1988 movie The Moderns in that way, though that movie mostly consisted of fictional characters. The plot has a lot of nice moments, mostly to do with O-Ei's interesting disposition, but...... ehhhhh to the rest of it.
The movie plays up a lot of stale dramatic moments you'll see coming a mile away and that have no relevancy to what you actually wanted to see, and the characters never really progress in any meaningful way. If this were a live-action film I would have hated it, I can be sure of that. So it's a pretty big disappointment for me.
