Inu-Oh review: Anime’s wildest creator is back with a weird, joyous rock opera

Considering the freeform, forward-thinking nature of Masaaki Yuasa’s animated work, it’s funny that his latest film, Inu-Oh, Start by looking forward. Science Saru Studio co-founder, director Eizouken: Keep your hands off!And Enjoy the Wave In the very first minutes of life, crosses many centuries Inu-Oh, starting in the modern day and rewinding hundreds of years in one spot, with buildings unmaking themselves in front of viewers’ eyes. That fast-paced deconstruction and reconstruction of history is just a taste of what’s to come: The movie packs a lot into a compact run time. A hidden history of authoritarianism and art. Inu-OhIt is an entertaining, and even sad exploration of how these two elements clash. It’s a psychedelic, bombastic rock opera, but amid all the energy, Yuasa ponders what stories have been lost as society’s more controlling elements attempt to control how art is made and distributed.

Yuasa performed musical sequences previously: it was a psychosexual illusion in Mind GameA long-running theatrical farce. Walking on Girl, the Night is ShortA look back on a loved one who has passed away Enjoy the Wave. These past projects can still be felt in many places. Inu-Oh, it still feels fresh and inventive as it focuses the director’s quirks into an electrifying revisionist history that’s joyous and tragic at the same time.

Based on Hideo Furukawa’s novel (whose modern translation is the Japanese epic). Heike Monogatari was the basis for Naoko Yamada’s superb anime adaptation, also with Science Saru), the film is set in 14th-century Japan in the Muromachi period, following the devastating Genpei War of 1180–1185. As the Ashikaga clan works tirelessly to protect its power, they quietly bury the Heike clan by controlling their history and censoring any stories.

GKIDS image

During a commissioned dive out at sea for Heike treasure, young Tomona, one of the film’s two leads, finds an artifact that reacts violently to their presence. Tomona soon loses both his father and his vision. His mother also suffers from grief shortly afterwards. Tomona begins a lonely journey in the role of a biwa Priest, keeping the Heike stories alive through song. He soon encounters the outcast Inu-Oh (translating to “Dog King” — he’s first seen eating with hounds), a child born with a curse of unknown origin, who is shunned for his physical appearance. Inu-Oh conceals his face with a gourd disguise. The film is inspired by vague myths about a Noh performer. It expands upon the limited information to show Inu-Oh as an outcast socially who’s real accomplishments are omitted from historical records.

Because Yuasa’s subjective perspective makes the first meeting between them meaningful, it feels immediate. Inu-Oh and Tomona’s points of views are encoded in each other’s contrasting cameras before they meet. Inu-Oh’s eye is characterized by a sort of keyhole camera racing through the streets and across rooftops, to onlookers’ horror. It’s a parodic performance of monstrosity, as he reconciles himself to his ostracization by leaning into alienating behavior. Tomona’s calmer side is evident. The oily, wide strokes of paint depict his struggle to adjust to the loss. The sounds and sensation of rain and singing biwa priests appear as vague, silhouetted impressions through Tomona’s senses, as Yuasa finds a minor musicality in everyday activities, paying careful attention to the minutiae of people’s lives.

It’s an early testament to the strength of visual storytelling at play, even amid the euphoria of the film’s music. The joy of them sharing their perspectives to others, through their art, is evident. They learn from each other — Tomona adopts some of Inu-Oh’s wild spirit, while Inu-Oh picks up Tomona’s sensitivity. The stories told by Heike were a common tradition among traveling biwa priests. However, they reinvent this style and bring it back to life. When they come across spirits of the dead Heike, they discover new stories.

They find their purpose in singing and performing the clan members’ stories with electric new style, and the film quickly swerves into its delightful premise: What if Beatlemania happened 600 years ago? Yuasa and screenwriter Akiko Nogi imagine two outsized responses to Inu-Oh and Tomona’s popularity: The public goes wild, and the authorities become suspicious, fearing subversiveness, especially when the music starts spreading the history that the government has consciously suppressed. It still has to deal with all the historical weight. Inu-OhAlso, he revels in sheer performance.

GKIDS image

As a director, Yuasa is best known for his characters’ thrilling rubber-band flexibility, and the ways he seeks out the same kind of elated freedom You can also read Inu-Oh and Tomona are exploring. In Inu-OhYuasa, Nogi and other traditional Japanese entertainers are also free from expectations. Inu-OhNoh theatre is merged with pop culture. Inu Oh sings high, piercing notes. Tomona (from the actor Mirai Muriyama) provides him with similarly fierce and grungy vocals. The sounds of electric guitars replace traditional instruments, and the two men salt their stage performances with Freddie Mercury-esque showmanship: One song moves to the beat of “We Will Rock You,” while another, named “Dragon Commander,” emulates the quickfire lyrics and borrowed operatic harmonies of “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Instead of classical dance-dramas, the movie’s musical sequences look like contemporary gigs, complete with light shows, crowd participation, and even black-clad security guards. The rest of the soundtrack maintains the playfulness beyond the vocal tracks. Yoshihide, a turntablist and instrumentalist, injects electronic tones in feudal settings.

Inuo-Oh and Tomona transform themselves from historical drama to musical theatre in the movie. Tomona shreds his biwa behind his back or with his teeth like Jimi Hendrix, or gyrates like Elvis while wearing biwa priest vestments modified to resemble the flared legs and deep V-neck of the King’s iconic rhinestone jumpsuit. Through his sense of style androgyny, Tomona later wows people and confuses governors. As anachronistic as the depiction is of crowd reactions, peasants even breakdance through them. Soul Train line. Meanwhile, where Inu-Oh’s appearance was once despised and feared, his status as an artist makes those same qualities revered and mythologized. And as their music pacifies the restless Heike spirits they commune with, Inu-Oh’s body changes too.

GKIDS image

While Yuasa delights in Inu-Oh’s atypical physicality, impossible dance moves, and angelic voice, he also becomes so involved in the technical logistics and the effects work of the concerts that the mechanics feel utterly real. The audience is tricked into believing that he’s performing magic on stage. It’s a genuinely astonishing illusory effect that gives the film that extra bit of immersion. It’s just one way in which Inu-Oh shows a keen interest in different textures and ways of seeing from across history, represented in its incorporation of classic paintings, and even the patchwork appearance of the film’s on-screen title, which replicates the cobbled-together fabrics of Inu-Oh’s shabby makeshift garments.

Yuasa creates the film using mixed media. She explores spaces with 3D CG animation and tactile, painted imagery. The stage acts aren’t the movie’s only focus — there are some slasher-type horror interludes as a mysterious figure stalks and kills roaming biwa priests, and even an out-of-body experience that will have some recalling 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It also rhymes at points with Yuasa’s Devilman Crybaby, in Inu-Oh and Tomona’s intimate relationship and fluid gender performance, which gets pushback to match Devilman Crybaby’s exploration of xenophobia. But not the strange, alien appearances of Devilman’s Akira and Ryo, as designed by Taiyo Matsumoto (as synergetic as ever with Yuasa’s sensibilities, from their past collaboration on Ping Pong The Animation) Inu-Oh’s characters feel both heavily stylized and ruggedly human. The stylization focuses on beauty, as the camera admires Tomona — now Tomoari — and the lithe, muscular form and provocative gyrations that make him a sex symbol for braying crowds.

The two musicians are also witnesses to a hidden history, and there’s something of an elegiac feeling to Inu-OhIt tells stories about the dead. Though Yuasa pits art against an oppressive government, the film isn’t naive about the upper limits of such outspokenness. It seems like the conservative resistance to their subversiveness was inevitable. It’s both a tragic postscript to the end of Heike rule, and perhaps a rumination by Yuasa on the impact his work would leave behind, likely a lingering thought for any artist. His film bookends its narrative with visions of slain priests and storytellers, history’s branches harshly cut off by people who want to reshape the final product. But there’s a twinkle of optimism to Inu-Oh regardless, in the act of artists living for themselves, in the immortality of creating work that lasts, stories that grow beyond their creators and beyond anyone’s oppressive control.

Inu-OhAmerican cinemas open August 12.