9. Inu-Oh, dir. Masaaki Yuasa
Inu-Oh is the best movie of 2022 nobody talked about. I only managed to find it by sheer random luck of checking new releases one Wednesday afternnon and seeing Masaaki Yuasa's name next to some words. Other than my own tweets, I haven't seen any buzz on social media. I don't think I convinced anybody about Inu-Oh either, sadly. It it absent from all the Top 10 lists. I feel like I dreamed this movie. But I am reasonably certain that I drove to a real AMC theater, saw actual celluloid or whatever comes out of projectors now on a screen, and the photons carried information into my eyeballs, that my brain translated correctly into a sequence of images, and Inu-Oh was those images. I believe this happened.
I saw three different anime musicals that came out in 2022. One was Mamoru Hosoda's Belle, an extravagantly beautiful experience that unfortunately I think is total trainwreck in terms of narrative. Then there was One Piece Film: Red, in which the Straw Hat Pirates took on the most dangerous and hypnotic pop star since Sharon Apple. Those movies had awesome banger songs, check those hyperlinks out and prepare for your friggin' ears explode. Anyway, the best of the anime musicals was Inu-Oh. It's not J-pop, it's not big Disney ballads, it's classical Noh theater meets hair metal. Who knew you could play the biwa like an electric guitar? Who knew they had glam rock in the Muromachi Era?
In order for western audiences to appreciate Inu-Oh, they are going to need a lot of cultural context, which the movie is not terribly interested in giving out. This film is depicting the backstory of the works that would become The Tale of the Heike, a Japanese epic depicting the Genpei War, one of the most famous civil wars in Japanese history. The heroes of the film sing about heroes and legends are obscure even to me. Just assume the battles were as cool as the anachronistic prog rock light shows are implying. Really what you need to know is that in medieval Japan there were two factions claiming legitimacy of the Imperial Throne, and one faction the Heike (more commonly known today as the Taira clan) lost. Inu-Oh is set some centuries later, in the period of the Ashikaga Shogunate, when the facts of the war have already turned to folk tale, and history is most malleable.
Inu-Oh has a very cynical view of governmental power. I notice this a lot in Japanese media, actually, governments are capricious and terrible forces not to be trifled with. The pure uncompromising hero will inevitably get crushed by those making backroom deals. Right from the start of Inu-Oh, our protagonist, Tomona (Mirai Moriyama) as a little boy gets a brief brush with power and is maimed for life by it. He lives as a diver with his family nearby the site of the Battle of Dan-no-ura, where a legendary sword of Imperial Regalia was lost along with child Heike claimant to the throne. When royal agents hire his father to find some "treasure", the magical sword shoots out a gleam of light so powerful it slices Tomona's father in half, and blinds the boy. Later, Tomona's concerts will be a massive pop sensation and lead a movement right up to the Shogun's palace. However, the canny politician is able to buy the movement, simply co-opting the opposition.
There also a recurring issue of control of historical narratives. Names are a recurring issue. Tomona takes on a new name, "Tomoichi" when he becomes a blind monk (a very popular trope of medieval Japan), which means he loses access to his father's spirit, who still hungers for vengeance. Tomona/Tomoichi becomes a friend to the titular creature, Inu-Oh (Avu Barazono), a gourd-shaped thing that is the living embodiment of the spirits of the lost Heike warriors. Inu-Oh begins as merely a little monster guy bothering the citizens of the old Japanese capital, Kyoto. But when exposed to music he learns to dance. Out of hunger for musical talent, he sprouts limbs. As Inu-Oh grows more and more human, he can finally express the pain of the losers of the war. Which leads him and Tomona to confront the Shogun, whose power rests on a very different idea of the past. As I said before, this is a very cynical movie. Justice and truth do not win in Inu-Oh. Power alone is the true power.
And also, as Inu-Oh becomes less and less a magical being, the more he's able to fit into a traditional power structure. Until finally, he's a regular person, indistinguishable from any other courtier. Inu-Oh is a movie about how we need to stay little freaks. Because the moment you lose your freak, you can be codified and controlled.
Still, Inu-Oh is a very fun movie. It is one of the best bro-tastic friendship movies of 2022. Tomona and Inu-Oh have a wild adventure that only gets more incredible the more impressive their concerts become and the less interested the movie is in any kind of realism. Anachronism after anachronism only makes the show better. Plus, Masaaki Yuasa has a very unique style to his animation. Somehow the film's wild swings from high melodrama politics to ten-minute long rock shows and back all flow naturally in a world already so sketchy and almost water-y in form. Like at any moment the lines could dissolve and the animation could just wash away, yet it never does. This is a magical realism story on a magical canvas. Yuasa one of the most interesting directors working in anime today, and Inu-Oh might be the best work I've seen out of him.
No comments:
Post a Comment