 ""Half Japanese" has the feel of a complete put-on,” wrote Stephen Holden in "The New York Times".Over a five-year period beginning in 2000, Feuerzeig created an innovative and sympathetic portrait of West Virginia-born cult singer-songwriter and outsider artist Daniel Johnston, whose early-20s onset of manic-depression and schizophrenia enabled him to create a nakedly confessional body of work unfiltered by the limitations of his contemporaries.Working from the conceit of clinical psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison’s "" (1993), and utilizing techniques from the New Journalism of the 1970s (the creation of first-person POV and internal monologue through audio cassette letters, journal entries, home movies, etc.