This film features a revolutionary artist named Sharaku in Edo-era Japan. Because the artist hasn't been identified by historians and we are not sure who he was, this historical film is based on a imaginary story like several Jack the Ripper films.
According to this film, the artist was born as a child of single parent who earned the living by painting with colored sand on street. He lost his single mother at the age of 6 and joined an acting troupe through his late mother's lover to grow up. He was talented not only with acrobatics on the stage but with painting. One day he happened to be employed as a contracted painter by a large capitalist-publisher. The publisher employed such an amateur because he searched for novel in order to recover the popularity of his own Kabuki company and Sharaku had it. Sharaku created amazingly realistic paintings which then Japanese public with dogmatic values can never create or accept.
Probably, the producers of this film wanted to tell Sharaku's realistic art was unexpected enlightenment in Japanese art and indirectly its society of late 18th century. In one scene, Rouju (I don't know how to translate this word, 'senior council member' would be good) Matsudaira tells us that Samurai's governance might be obsolete and might not fit the growing mercantile society. And in another scene, the artist refused to paint persons he never saw, but the people around him never found his refusal reasonable. These 2 scenes reflects the film's historical and social view, especially the latter depicts then Japanese public's fixed artistic values that supported the old Eastern idea that art should imitate art itself, not reality.
This film in the end implies that Sharaku's art was passed on to Hokusai's.
According to this film, the artist was born as a child of single parent who earned the living by painting with colored sand on street. He lost his single mother at the age of 6 and joined an acting troupe through his late mother's lover to grow up. He was talented not only with acrobatics on the stage but with painting. One day he happened to be employed as a contracted painter by a large capitalist-publisher. The publisher employed such an amateur because he searched for novel in order to recover the popularity of his own Kabuki company and Sharaku had it. Sharaku created amazingly realistic paintings which then Japanese public with dogmatic values can never create or accept.
Probably, the producers of this film wanted to tell Sharaku's realistic art was unexpected enlightenment in Japanese art and indirectly its society of late 18th century. In one scene, Rouju (I don't know how to translate this word, 'senior council member' would be good) Matsudaira tells us that Samurai's governance might be obsolete and might not fit the growing mercantile society. And in another scene, the artist refused to paint persons he never saw, but the people around him never found his refusal reasonable. These 2 scenes reflects the film's historical and social view, especially the latter depicts then Japanese public's fixed artistic values that supported the old Eastern idea that art should imitate art itself, not reality.
This film in the end implies that Sharaku's art was passed on to Hokusai's.