‘Blank Canvas': 'Tough love' of the past isn't so funny anymore
The master-apprentice relationship, usually with a man in the former role and a woman in the latter, has been a popular theme in recent Japanese films. The appeal to the target audience is aspirational, since learning how to make scrumptious tofu or Chinese food, even from an irascible older guy, sounds more fulfilling than whatever dull gig they are actually doing.
Kazuaki Seki's 'Blank Canvas: My So-Called Artist's Journey' takes this relationship to cartoonish extremes that may give viewers pause about following in the protagonist's footsteps.
Based on an autobiographical comic by Akiko Higashimura and starring Mei Nagano in the title role, the film traces Akiko's path from childhood prodigy (she's compared by her comically indulgent parents to Pablo Picasso) to successful manga artist. But the focus is squarely on Akiko's long apprenticeship under Kenzo Hidaka (Yo Oizumi), an art teacher in her native Miyazaki Prefecture.
Kenzo runs his art academy like a hard-nosed phys ed instructor in a lower-tier boys' school, despite enjoying a considerable reputation for his own work. Dressed in a track suit and carrying a bamboo sword, he patrols his cramped classroom shouting terse judgments and commands to his cowed charges, with 'bad' and 'draw' among the favorites.
When the lazy and overconfident Akiko joins his class in her senior year of high school, she is shocked by Kenzo's dismissive evaluation of her portfolio ('bad, bad, bad') and his crude methods, which include physical force. (The film frames his periodic manhandling of Akiko as slapstick comedy.)
Her feelings hurt and ego crushed, Akiko lies about having stomach pains and makes her escape, only to have Kenzo give her a piggyback ride to the bus stop where he sits with her for an hour until the next bus comes. This loud, abrasive man, she realizes, is genuinely concerned about her welfare and talent.
So she returns to his class and, under his tough-love instruction, grows as an artist, though she is still the teenager who hates to exert herself in class and loves to goof off with friends. This attitude gets her into trouble when college entrance exams loom and she faces fierce competition to enter her two selected art schools. Here again Kenzo is gruffly supportive, though Akiko manages to overcome the exam hurdle in her own oddball way.
Both Nagano and Oizumi play their roles to the manga-esque hilt, while establishing their characters' strong emotional bonds beneath their mugging antics. So when the story darkens in the third act, the change in tone doesn't come as a complete surprise.
The film also details Akiko's rise from amateur to pro without airbrushing the harsh realities of the manga business, starting with its workaholic lifestyles. Nonetheless, Kenzo's violence as a teacher — the sort of thing long excused as ai no muchi (whip of love) — is disturbing, as well as a reminder that 'Blank Canvas: My So-Called Artist's Journey' is set three decades ago.
For this former boys' high school teacher, who witnessed a fellow instructor cracking a bamboo sword on adolescent heads, the film is too much a sentimental celebration of an educational past that, in its toleration of abuse, was bad, bad, bad.
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