Recently I have been taking some interest in the idea that art can be used as a tool for healing. The idea isn’t a new one. Many people use art or sometimes art appreciation to deal with their troubled thoughts or to relax, to blow off steam. Many people find meaning and renewed passion when they explore their abilities through art. But are the pleasures of art enough to offer solace to the broken even in the midst of life’s seemingly most senseless tragedies?

The Lines That Define Me, a new movie based on the novel of the same name by Hiromasa Togami (who has also published essays, several novels, and serialized stories) and directed by Norihiro Koizumi (most famous for Midnight Sun [2006] and the live action Chihayafuru trilogy), explores these issues with a light touch, appended with familiar melodramatic strokes. While not a newfound masterpiece, The Lines that Define Me adroitly sketches out a familiar and emotional tale.

In rough, the story begins with troubled college-age Sousuke Aoyama (Ryusei Yokoyama, The Kaiju Club) helping to set up for an art exhibition being put on by the great suibokuga artist Kozan Shinoda (Tomokazu Miura, the Always trilogy). After finishing his main duties, Aoyama stumbles on some of Shinoda’s artwork and mysteriously finds himself bursting into tears while gazing at it—and Shinoda witnesses the event. Apparently moved by the young man’s emotional display, the elderly artist takes the boy under his wing and insists on teaching him the secrets of suibokuga—much to the consternation of his granddaughter, Chiaki Shinoda (Kaya Kiyohara, March Comes in Like a Lion), who is a skilled suibokuga artist herself. She does not welcome Aoyama, and is annoyed to have an upstart rival in the house. As Aoyama grows in his enthusiasm and ability, Chiaki also is pushed into the limelight with invitations to lecture and share her work. And the increasing pressures bring the pair into a strained rivalry-cum-friendship. But Aoyama has a tragic past that threatens to overwhelm him, and the sadness and difficulty of life is always lurking in the shadows, ready to rip apart their world.

The Lines that Define Me (the Japanese title means something like “the lines that draw me”) includes many predictable cliches of the coming-of-age tale, with Shinoda taking the familiar wise-teacher role, Aoyama the usual innocent-but-broken prodigy, and the granddaughter the expected beautiful-and-talented-yet-conflicted rival/possible love interest. The story takes these timeworn story elements and pushes them about through a dappled and gentle landscape of events, and while nothing is overly surprising to the attentive viewer, the story unfolds as a soft and sweet meditation on life and loss. The provides moving moments of emotional clarity and a laudable sense of thematic unity that ties the imagery of ink and artistry, too, bleeds into both a road to redemption and release, but also connects to the ugliness of sudden tragedy and natural disaster. The movie aims for comfort-food level storytelling, and for all the criticism that can be leveled at the low bar to which the movie aspires, I think it hits what it is aiming for. The movie deftly depicts the loveliness of suibokuga (ink-wash painting) through the various styles of the protagonists, and their perhaps overly sweet relationships nevertheless allow for a cuddly-warm family-style drama. A viewer going in without great expectations for groundbreaking narrative will find something to enjoy on that more subdued level of mainstream entertainment.

Performances are competent. Yokoyama as Aoyama emotes and weeps, gleefully paints, and ponders life with blinkered naivete as he blunders through his beginnings as an artist and bumbles socially. Miura strikes a stoic and confident mien—in my mind I kept comparing him to Mr. Miyagi from the Karate Kid franchise. He is the all-wise, unperturbed, uber-man who has mastered not only art, but life, and lives with love and power in his heart. Miura takes those overdone principles and crafts an unoriginal but genuinely likable old fartist, and they achieve a sense of authenticity by showing the actor doing some of his own artwork. Kiyohara as Chiaki is similarly good enough, displaying the requisite annoyance, staid sense of superiority, and eventual warmth and growth required for the undemanding role. While some of the minor roles may not be strong (with a particularly forced performance from Aoyama’s best friend sometimes proving more irritating than amusing to me), the mains acquit themselves perfectly well for this kind of drama.

Meanwhile, the music for me fumbles, with the main score failing to inspire. The impression it made on me was something like tonal sound effects twinkling and masquerading as music, the sort of thing I have often seen in anime and films in Japan, the sort of atmospheric fluorescence which doesn’t create a memorable melody, nor a sustained sense of theme beyond an establishment of a mildness of mood. I might call it elevator music of a sort, but perhaps the tunes here are too quirky for that. Still, the theme song by Vaundy played over the credits (which also features visuals of delicate, sweeping brush strokes for the transition into the end roll) is catchy pop-rock that warrants a jaunty head-bob when out on a stroll.

For all my kvetching above that The Lines that Define Me is so very, very normal, I honestly really enjoyed myself when I attended the film. For me, I walked in not knowing a thing about the movie outside of the trailers, and it provides a couple hours of giant brushes, splashing ink, gushing emotions, drama, sadness, and hope, all tucked together cozily and with a lingering, loving sense of the beauty of nature and the joy of mastering art and life in community. I appreciated the movie as a soft embrace that allowed me to briefly contemplate life and expression again in an undemanding format, and sometimes that is enough, even for all the fuzzy, scribbly cliches. To return to my observations at the beginning of this essay, the art here gave me a small pond of solace in the chaotic world I have found myself in, and I think there is value in that. The only problem, of course, is that the movie probably won’t have any sort of wide release in the USA and most other English-speaking territories, despite the manga adaptation receiving an English release. Still, if you do get the chance to watch this movie on a plane ride or other media, and you like sort of higher-end Hallmark-style emotionally charged dramas, this one might be worth a navel gaze or two.