Biwa, biwa rock you
Around the time that the Japanese animated feature Inu-oh premiered at the 2021 Venice International Film Festival, its director, Yuasa Masaaki, announced that he'd be taking a break of indeterminate length. Few people can claim to have better earned such a thing: after co-founding the animation studio Science SARU in 2013, Yuasa sank an absolutely unbelievable amount of labor into making sure that studio got the best chance at life he could give it, and his output since then has been unrelenting in its volume - especially since 2017, with four feature films, four television series, and a feature film condensed from one of those series, all in less than four and a half years. Incredibly, not only has Yuasa's work experienced no obvious dip in quality across that flood of material, almost none of those projects can even be described as merely "very good" - there are multiple masterpieces to be savored in that wealth of content, including 2017's Night Is Short, Walk On Girl, for which there is an extremely credible argument that it's the single best animated feature of the 2010s.
Inu-oh is thus a major event twice over: first, because at this point, any Yuasa feature automatically qualifies as a major event, and second, because it represents the capstone and climax to one of the very greatest runs of creativity of any cinematic artist in living memory. And it should come as no surprise, given how much Yuasa and Science SARU have been making radical, groundbreaking animation look easy, over and over again, for so many years now, that Inu-oh handily lives up to every expectation I might put on it, without even looking like it's trying to do so. If the best I can manage is to call it his third-best feature out of five - behind Night Is Short, Walk On Girl and 2004's Mind Game, ahead of 2019's Ride Your Wave and 2017's Lu Over the Wall (which is just a staggeringly good movie to be the director's fifth-best feature) - that is entirely a reflection on the extraordinary quality of what has gone before it. For Inu-oh is simultaneously the best animated feature of 2022 (the year of its commercial debut, including in the United States), and I would say the first unabashed masterpiece-level animated feature to come out since the start of the pandemic in early 2020 clamped down on movies coming out.
The story is mostly set some 600 years ago, during the period of the Ashikaga Shogunate, 300 years after the nautical Battle of Dan-no-ura, a major event in the war that ended the Heian period and transitioned practical control of the government of Japan from the imperial line to a series of military dictators, the shoguns (the math doesn't work out, and I don't suppose it matters; it's at least plausible that it's a translation error). The battle itself is one of the key events in the Tale of the Heike, one of the major works of Japanese literature, and that text is part of the ambient background of Inu-oh in a way that makes it very clear that Yuasa and screenwriter Nogi Akiko (adapting the screenplay from a novel by Furukawa Hideo) expects their ideal viewer to already know much of this. And possibly to also know the legends of the historical Inu-oh, a Noh theater performer about whom virtually no concrete facts are recorded, which allowed Furukawa, and through him Nogi and Yuasa, to tell a wholly fanciful story. Wholly fanciful. In brief, Inu-oh posits a world in which hard rock was invented 600 years ahead of schedule in Japan, and was thus a biwa-based rather than a guitar-based medium, and also genderbending hair metal costume and performance was invented along with it, and also this was related to the composition of an alternative story about the Battle of Dan-no-ura that was attacked and suppressed by the Ashikaga shogun, who was at the same time promoting the composition of the classic Tale of the Heike as a politically legitimating work of propaganda.
Does that sound like a lot? It is a lot. Inu-oh is both maximalist and, in a very odd way, minimalist. The minimalism comes in the form of the actual plot, which rushes like hell to introduce us Tomona (Moriyama Mirai), who was blinded as a child when his father accidentally unleashed the power of an ancient imperial sword that was lost in the sea at the Battle of Dan-no-ura, and who now makes a living as a biwa player under the name of Tomoichi, performing recitals in which he recounts the events of the battle in order to help the souls of those lost in the battle escape their torment. Along the way, he meets Inu-oh (Avu-chan), the youngest son of a family of Noh dancers who was cursed with a malformed, scale-covered body, all four of his limbs extending at odd angles and different lengths, obliging him to invent a new form of dancing. As the two men continue freeing spirits of dead warriors, Inu-oh's curse is lifted, one body part at a time. I am well aware that I have not, as yet, described anything that can fairly be called "minimalist". As I said, the film rushes through all this very fast, and God help you if you miss any of it; but then it gets to the point that Tomoichi and Inu-oh invent hard rock and cross-dressing, and the story of Inu-oh basically stops cold. What remains is almost nothing but concert scenes, one of which is almost a half-hour long, with tiny cutaways to the Official People grousing at this dangerously rebellious, radical music and way of presenting oneself.
The point, in other words, is music, and performance, and the goofy pleasure of watching an animated costume drama function as a hair metal concert doc. The film offers up some ideas about the political impact of art, and the way that artistic creation can function as a way of refining one's identity outside of social norms; it puts these ideas right front-and-center, where you cannot possibly miss them and don't have to work for them, which feels right for the kind of unsubtle, loud music that Yuasa and company are celebrating here. This is a story about being honest and raw, not about being crafty and oblique.
Also, I think if the filmmakers did want to be subtle with their ideas, those ideas would have been completely swamped by the sheer quantity of movie here. It's wall-to-wall music, with composer Otomo Yoshihide creating what amounts to a 90-minute suite of rock music inspired specifically by the bands Foreigner, Deep Purple, and Queen, transmuted through traditional Japanese instrumentation (when I first encountered an interview where Yuasa name-dropped those three bands, my response was "well, that's a weird hodgepodge", and I'm amazed to report back that you can in fact hear those three specific groups very clearly as the music evolves across the film's length, and it always somehow feels perfectly organic and natural). It's a very deliberately overstimulating soundtrack, and you could get a hell of a lot out of the movie just by closing your eyes and listening to it, even if you didn't speak a word of Japanese.
Which you of course ought not do, because then you'd miss out on the most elaborate collection of mixed styles and different approaches to character animation in any of Yuasa's films since Mind Game itself. The film gives us exactly one and only one way to anchor ourselves: more often than not, you can probably get away with saying "it's inspired by ukiyo-e prints", the brightly-colored, unapologetically flat art form that was born and thrived centuries after Inu-oh takes place. But this is already a film stuffed full of shred biwa solos, so anachronism isn't something to be concerned about here. The point is, much of the film does definitely seem to take some of its cues from ukiyo-e, particularly how it favors flowing lines and stylised facial expressions, mixing the aesthetic with digital animation techniques that give everything a sharp, clean look. The most striking thing about it, I think, is not the extraordinarily smooth movement of Inu-oh's flailing limbs, but the way that the highly detailed textures and designs of fabrics seem to float within characters, creating their own private geometry separate from the rest of the movie, moving in a way that is unimaginable in any other medium than digital animation mimicking hand-drawn animation. The sharpness and stability of the colors, plus the traditional-looking linework, and the frequent empty patches of white in the backgrounds, all serve to make Inu-oh feel like Yuasa's delayed response to The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, Takahata Isao's swan song from 2013, a film that surprisingly hasn't really generated too many responses. Takes a genius to grapple with a genius, I suppose.
Anyway, that's all one thing, and Inu-oh has many things. Just in the backgrounds, there's a constant tension between the stylised ukiyo-e influence, particularly in the blankness, and the extreme realism of the spaces being drawn - this following upon a brief prologue of a city street that's so realistic I wouldn't swear it wasn't just live action photography with some digital filters. That prologue, at least, is meant to contrast with the more ancient feeling of the main part of the movie, but the realistic backgrounds throughout are, think, more about trying to remind us that this is all grounded in a version of actual history, and that the political and ethical questions the film is dancing around with are rooted in real concerns. So that's one strand. Then, there's the way the film visualises Tomona's blindness, with his impression of the world created in a mixture of what looks like water colors and scuffed pencils. During the concert scenes, the film uses lighting effects that loudly proclaim their digital nature as they softly transition from dark to light and from cold to warm colors. Some of the character animation nods to classic Western techniques of bouncy, rubbery cartooning more than anything that has been traditionally used in Japanese animation. It's a barrage of different styles, in short, all of them thoughtfully used in concert with the flow of the story and the shift between characters' points of view, so that it never feels anarchic or random. So it might very well be Yuasa's most controlled movie, which is remarkable for something this energetic and wild and weird. And if this is where he intends to leave us for a while, he's done so with the best possible reminder of what a remarkable talent he takes with him.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Inu-oh is thus a major event twice over: first, because at this point, any Yuasa feature automatically qualifies as a major event, and second, because it represents the capstone and climax to one of the very greatest runs of creativity of any cinematic artist in living memory. And it should come as no surprise, given how much Yuasa and Science SARU have been making radical, groundbreaking animation look easy, over and over again, for so many years now, that Inu-oh handily lives up to every expectation I might put on it, without even looking like it's trying to do so. If the best I can manage is to call it his third-best feature out of five - behind Night Is Short, Walk On Girl and 2004's Mind Game, ahead of 2019's Ride Your Wave and 2017's Lu Over the Wall (which is just a staggeringly good movie to be the director's fifth-best feature) - that is entirely a reflection on the extraordinary quality of what has gone before it. For Inu-oh is simultaneously the best animated feature of 2022 (the year of its commercial debut, including in the United States), and I would say the first unabashed masterpiece-level animated feature to come out since the start of the pandemic in early 2020 clamped down on movies coming out.
The story is mostly set some 600 years ago, during the period of the Ashikaga Shogunate, 300 years after the nautical Battle of Dan-no-ura, a major event in the war that ended the Heian period and transitioned practical control of the government of Japan from the imperial line to a series of military dictators, the shoguns (the math doesn't work out, and I don't suppose it matters; it's at least plausible that it's a translation error). The battle itself is one of the key events in the Tale of the Heike, one of the major works of Japanese literature, and that text is part of the ambient background of Inu-oh in a way that makes it very clear that Yuasa and screenwriter Nogi Akiko (adapting the screenplay from a novel by Furukawa Hideo) expects their ideal viewer to already know much of this. And possibly to also know the legends of the historical Inu-oh, a Noh theater performer about whom virtually no concrete facts are recorded, which allowed Furukawa, and through him Nogi and Yuasa, to tell a wholly fanciful story. Wholly fanciful. In brief, Inu-oh posits a world in which hard rock was invented 600 years ahead of schedule in Japan, and was thus a biwa-based rather than a guitar-based medium, and also genderbending hair metal costume and performance was invented along with it, and also this was related to the composition of an alternative story about the Battle of Dan-no-ura that was attacked and suppressed by the Ashikaga shogun, who was at the same time promoting the composition of the classic Tale of the Heike as a politically legitimating work of propaganda.
Does that sound like a lot? It is a lot. Inu-oh is both maximalist and, in a very odd way, minimalist. The minimalism comes in the form of the actual plot, which rushes like hell to introduce us Tomona (Moriyama Mirai), who was blinded as a child when his father accidentally unleashed the power of an ancient imperial sword that was lost in the sea at the Battle of Dan-no-ura, and who now makes a living as a biwa player under the name of Tomoichi, performing recitals in which he recounts the events of the battle in order to help the souls of those lost in the battle escape their torment. Along the way, he meets Inu-oh (Avu-chan), the youngest son of a family of Noh dancers who was cursed with a malformed, scale-covered body, all four of his limbs extending at odd angles and different lengths, obliging him to invent a new form of dancing. As the two men continue freeing spirits of dead warriors, Inu-oh's curse is lifted, one body part at a time. I am well aware that I have not, as yet, described anything that can fairly be called "minimalist". As I said, the film rushes through all this very fast, and God help you if you miss any of it; but then it gets to the point that Tomoichi and Inu-oh invent hard rock and cross-dressing, and the story of Inu-oh basically stops cold. What remains is almost nothing but concert scenes, one of which is almost a half-hour long, with tiny cutaways to the Official People grousing at this dangerously rebellious, radical music and way of presenting oneself.
The point, in other words, is music, and performance, and the goofy pleasure of watching an animated costume drama function as a hair metal concert doc. The film offers up some ideas about the political impact of art, and the way that artistic creation can function as a way of refining one's identity outside of social norms; it puts these ideas right front-and-center, where you cannot possibly miss them and don't have to work for them, which feels right for the kind of unsubtle, loud music that Yuasa and company are celebrating here. This is a story about being honest and raw, not about being crafty and oblique.
Also, I think if the filmmakers did want to be subtle with their ideas, those ideas would have been completely swamped by the sheer quantity of movie here. It's wall-to-wall music, with composer Otomo Yoshihide creating what amounts to a 90-minute suite of rock music inspired specifically by the bands Foreigner, Deep Purple, and Queen, transmuted through traditional Japanese instrumentation (when I first encountered an interview where Yuasa name-dropped those three bands, my response was "well, that's a weird hodgepodge", and I'm amazed to report back that you can in fact hear those three specific groups very clearly as the music evolves across the film's length, and it always somehow feels perfectly organic and natural). It's a very deliberately overstimulating soundtrack, and you could get a hell of a lot out of the movie just by closing your eyes and listening to it, even if you didn't speak a word of Japanese.
Which you of course ought not do, because then you'd miss out on the most elaborate collection of mixed styles and different approaches to character animation in any of Yuasa's films since Mind Game itself. The film gives us exactly one and only one way to anchor ourselves: more often than not, you can probably get away with saying "it's inspired by ukiyo-e prints", the brightly-colored, unapologetically flat art form that was born and thrived centuries after Inu-oh takes place. But this is already a film stuffed full of shred biwa solos, so anachronism isn't something to be concerned about here. The point is, much of the film does definitely seem to take some of its cues from ukiyo-e, particularly how it favors flowing lines and stylised facial expressions, mixing the aesthetic with digital animation techniques that give everything a sharp, clean look. The most striking thing about it, I think, is not the extraordinarily smooth movement of Inu-oh's flailing limbs, but the way that the highly detailed textures and designs of fabrics seem to float within characters, creating their own private geometry separate from the rest of the movie, moving in a way that is unimaginable in any other medium than digital animation mimicking hand-drawn animation. The sharpness and stability of the colors, plus the traditional-looking linework, and the frequent empty patches of white in the backgrounds, all serve to make Inu-oh feel like Yuasa's delayed response to The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, Takahata Isao's swan song from 2013, a film that surprisingly hasn't really generated too many responses. Takes a genius to grapple with a genius, I suppose.
Anyway, that's all one thing, and Inu-oh has many things. Just in the backgrounds, there's a constant tension between the stylised ukiyo-e influence, particularly in the blankness, and the extreme realism of the spaces being drawn - this following upon a brief prologue of a city street that's so realistic I wouldn't swear it wasn't just live action photography with some digital filters. That prologue, at least, is meant to contrast with the more ancient feeling of the main part of the movie, but the realistic backgrounds throughout are, think, more about trying to remind us that this is all grounded in a version of actual history, and that the political and ethical questions the film is dancing around with are rooted in real concerns. So that's one strand. Then, there's the way the film visualises Tomona's blindness, with his impression of the world created in a mixture of what looks like water colors and scuffed pencils. During the concert scenes, the film uses lighting effects that loudly proclaim their digital nature as they softly transition from dark to light and from cold to warm colors. Some of the character animation nods to classic Western techniques of bouncy, rubbery cartooning more than anything that has been traditionally used in Japanese animation. It's a barrage of different styles, in short, all of them thoughtfully used in concert with the flow of the story and the shift between characters' points of view, so that it never feels anarchic or random. So it might very well be Yuasa's most controlled movie, which is remarkable for something this energetic and wild and weird. And if this is where he intends to leave us for a while, he's done so with the best possible reminder of what a remarkable talent he takes with him.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Categories: animation, costume dramas, japanese cinema, musicals, top 10, yuasa masaaki
