Inu-oh, 2022
Directed by Masaaki Yuasa
Starring Avu-chan (voice), Mirai Moriyama (voice), Kenjirô Tsuda (voice), Yutaka Matsushige (voice) and Tasuku Emoto (voice)
SYNOPSIS:
A fictionalized depiction of the life of Inu-oh (“King Dog”), a 14th-century Japanese performer of music drama at the time of its transition from the folk art of sarugaku (“monkey music”) into the formalized traditions of Noh and kyôgen.
It can sometimes take a little bit of time in order for you to fall in love with a piece of music or a song. Something initially jarring can soon become a hit-repeat masterpiece once you’re attuned to the rhythm of a particular artist. In the case of director Masaaki Yuasa’s history lesson of feudal Japan filtered through the rock-opera stylings of Queen or the kaleidoscope confetti of a Coldplay concert, that happens around about track 2, and then never lets up during a mind-boggling, percussive, intoxicating musical anime that’s quite unlike anything you’ve seen before.
Adapted from Hideo Funrukawa’s 2017 novel Tales of the Heike: Inu-Oh, Yuasa’s musical odyssey is set against a complicated historical background, which can be quite impenetrable to the casual viewer. Based on a popular real-life Noh performer, which is the Japanese art of masked drama accompanied with song and dance, the film is the story of Tomona (Mirai Moriyama), who was blinded as a young boy and raised with a group of traditional Biwa playing priests. As they travel Japan seeking new stories to tell through their music, Tomona encounters Inu-oh, a hideously deformed ‘monster’ (voiced superbly by transgender Japanese rock star Avu-chan), who moves around using his extended arm, and wears a mask to hide his face.
The two quickly become friends, soon realising their unique individualism brings the best out of eachother during their collaborations, so-much-so that it begins to have transformative effects on Tomona and Inu-oh; in the former it manifests a new level of confidence, casting aside traditional dress, and sometimes clothes altogether as he becomes a kind of 14th-Century non-conformist Ziggy Stardust, whereas Inu-oh experiences a regenerative process that evolves with every new note he reaches or dance move he pulls off. However, such flamboyant expressiveness and new style of storytelling flies in the face of Shogunate tradition, with the Japanese military preferring that history lessons are all sang from the same hymn book.
Beautifully brought to life using an aged colour palette, which only accentuates the moments in which the film explodes into a hallucinogenic light show, Inu-oh is a heady concoction that’s best experienced knowing as little as possible going in, before allowing its unique beats to assault your senses in the best way possible.
Things start slowly, with a truncated history lesson and your standard character back-story sequences, before this is all tossed aside like one of Inu-oh’s extended limbs in favour of a series of sing-a-longs that eventually build to a crescendo involving flying dragons, neon face-paint, and the souls of the legendary Heike. It’s ambitious, albeit a little suffocating when it comes to any character development, but the numbers are so huge and infectiously good, largely due to Avu-chan’s stunning vocal-range and the Freddy Mercury-style foot-stomping nature of it all, that you’re just carried along by the music.
On which, the moment in which Tomona leaps atop a bridge, encouraging the gathering crowds to clap in unison to the propulsive riff that will provide the foundation to the sound of the rest of the film, is one that even the Live Aid bombast of Bohemian Rhapsody cannot match. It kick-starts an enjoyable and exhausting opus that could prove to be the divisive moment for anyone not willing to travel the glam-rock route through ancient Japan.
Beneath the ambitious bravura and showmanship can be found a resonant and thoroughly depressing cautionary tale about how history can be re-written and censored by governments, but with contemporarily aligned protagonists like Tomona and Inu-oh as inspirational lead characters, and a couple of barnstorming tunes, much like its revered director, Inu-oh ought to leave its own indelible legacy to be told for years to come.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie ★ ★ ★ ★
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