Fact-checking biopics is an easy game for critics to play since nearly all films about real people fudge facts or even outright lie to tell a story. I've played the game myself, but in the case of Shuichi Okita's delightful "Mori, the Artist's Habitat," it's almost beside the point.
Celebrated in Japan for his late-career paintings of flowers, insects and other natural phenomena in a childlike style, Morikazu Kumagai (1880-1977) isn't well-known abroad. So Okita's film, which is based on his own script, is a welcome introduction, though it focuses on only one day in the then-94-year-old artist's life and never shows him actually painting.
The story is as simple-seeming as one of Kumagai's cat paintings but goes beyond the surface of his obsessions and quirks, the best known being his reclusion, to pointed, affectionate dissection of his character and world.
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