Inu-Oh (2022)
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Inu-Oh Movie Review
Inu-Oh is a 2022 musical fantasy anime film directed by Masaaki Yuasa. It is a movie that I wholly admire, but I found it to be far from an engaging watch.
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“Everything is fiction“
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Inu-Oh is born with unique physical characteristics, and the horrified adults cover his face with a mask. One day, he meets a boy named Tomona, a blind biwa player, and as Tomona plays a delicate song, Inu-Oh discovers an incredible ability to dance. The film is set 900 years in the past and it is very much mythological and ancient not just in its setting and time period, but also in the storytelling style.
I am talking about an overemphasis on not just the visuals to tell the story, but music too. The movie may very well be regarded as a musical, though it’s not your regular modern musical, but one that feels like ancient poetry. This obviously made it an acquired taste as I found it personally tedious and slow.
The overwhelming focus on visuals also wasn’t my cup of tea, though obviously I found the animation here incredible. The hand-drawn style is beautiful, colorful and aesthetically different from other anime movies in its inspirations, which is the very time period itself. This visual outburst is sometimes too much, but you cannot really deny the artistry on display here.
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With that being said, Inu-Oh failed to move me emotionally because the characterization is beyond slight and thus I failed to care for the people involved. The storytelling is also very messy and difficult to follow. It starts off great, but the second half became too disorienting and confusing for me to follow, which was a shame as the premise was intriguing and the ode to this rarely depicted time period in Japan’s history and its traditions in music was quite fascinating and important.
Inu-Oh is an acquired taste. Just like the ancient time period that it depicts, this anime movie is also very much traditional in the storytelling style that features very little explanations as it focuses extensively on visuals and music to tell the story. This resulted in a film that is undeniably impressive in its artistry, but difficult to follow in its disorienting narrative.
My Rating – 3.5
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