by Nathaniel R
Last week we had the pleasure of an invitation to the East Coast premiere of the anime rock opera Inu-Oh, which opens in theaters today. It's distributed by GKids, a company which has long championed non-Hollywood animation for US audiences who we all know can be stubbornly myopic about animation, viewing it as a genre rather than a medium capable of all kinds of genres and visual experiences. The screening was at Japan Society here in Manhattan. I bring this up primarily because I had somehow never been there and must highly recommend the venue which has monthly screenings of both anime films and acclaimed live action Japanese films, too (recent films included everything from Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke to the kaiju film Mothra, to Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha). Seeing specialty films, which generally play to tiny arthouse crowds, in a beautiful respectful context to a large packed crowd is always a thrill (one of the reasons film festivals, never lose their thrill).
And Inu-Oh deserves a big screen so don't wait until streaming if it hits a theater near you...
The animated rock opera comes the acclaimed director Masaaki Yuasa (who we've discussed before via Ride Your Wave, Lu Over the Wall, and The Night is Short, Walk on Girl). The complex and at times difficult-to-follow story begins with a strange prologue involving a diving family who meet a terrible supernatural fate while recovering a treasure from the ocean floor, the father killed and the son blinded. Years late the blind son, now a young man, is living a humble life as a musician specializing in the biwa (a wooden lute).
While Inu-Oh is never dull given its inventive and disorienting visuals -- Yuasa often takes us into point of view shots where our sight is blurry or distorted to reflect the characters and situations -- the movie takes its time getting its narrative hooks in. After a meet-cute of sorts between the blind man and a deformed stranger in a gourd mask (our titular character), thinks really take off. Inu-oh loves wreaking mischievious havoc on terrified villagers. But the blind young man Tomona isn't scared of him because he can't see his strange unsettling physique. Once these two young men, both musically gifted, both cursed by evil-spirits (the blindness and deformity), are united the movie begins to take shape.
Tomona's lute playing and his scantily clad gyrations, drive the crowd wild
It's not a fixed shape, to be certain. The most thrilling thing about the movie is the way it self-mythologizes and evolves. The young men choose new names and keep playing with their identities. Inu-Oh shape-shifts right in front of you -- quite literally! Their crazy theatrics and looks, in amusing contrast to the formal 14th century world all around them, are very 20th century pulling from numerous musical traditions like glam rock, punk, and heavy metal. The more famous they get the more wild the movie becomes. The movies sedate color palette makes the more hallucinatory saturated colors really fly off the screen when they arrive.
Will Inu-Oh raise Yuasa's international profile as an anime auteur yet further? It's tough to say. While never short on creativity, the plot points (and there are a lot of them) and storytelling rhythms are hard to fathom at times since there's more than enough to keep you busy between the visual wonders and loud head-banging music with its storytelling lyrics. Still the rise of this punk duo, as the movie shoves most other narrative concerns aside for a series of increasingly vivid rock concerts, is sensationally out there. Unmissable, really.
The middle act rock opera: A
The opening and closing: C
Overall: B+?