At the 25th annual SCAD Savannah Film Festival a unique new anime rock opera shined amongst the crowd called “Inu Oh”.
The Story is loosely based on historical acts, albeit its very liberal in its interpretation, mainly due to the fact that a lot of research and figuring out had to be done because the time period this was set in was 600 years ago in Feudal Japan. Certain records are lost, so many things are taken with creative liberty, whilst still being mixed in with true history. That however made this a good film. It clearly has its own style and its unique way of expressing itself and the music, which is a key component of the film and perfectly demonstrated this unique mixture.
The film follows a man who is blinded as a child and becomes a biwa player, a biwa is the high-pitched Japanese stringed instrument, not dissimilar to a guitar or Lute. He then joins a group, or troupe of Biwa priests. The blind man starts performing with this man he found on the street, who was born deformed. He wears a mask in order to keep up with the show of societal order and to not scare others. It is also part of the show’s act. This performer and dancer is the titular character Inu Oh.
They go tell stories about their lives as Biwa priests. They do it with a lot of, for lack of a better word, pizzaz. One of the main issues that arises, is that the new Shogun that takes over, wants control over what the perform, this becomes a key component in the latter half of the movie.
When they are performing, the biwa is not the only instrument that they use in the film. They wanted to take a lot of creative liberties to show the awe and the spectacle of the performances as it relates to us in the modern day. During the time this was set in, Inu Oh was known as one of Japan’s greatest performers, so in order to explore those ideas, each performance had a large light show sprinkled with some electric guitar. The fusion of these genres makes the movie that much more powerful and the soundtrack amazing. Overall, each of the acts are a great Japanese rock performance.
For example, in one of their 1st acts Inu Oh does a lot of crazy contortions with his body and because the two main characters have been so intrinsically linked to spirits in their past, you see many light spirits floating around during all of these performances.
As a consequence, much of the movie is based on Japanese folklore and that makes it very interesting because you have these spiritual demons mixed in with this rock grandiosity. It makes everything interesting because it’s done in the basis of a historical format but then bends everything into a surreal perspective
Much of the film had dynamic camera shots that really kept the eye moving and there was never a dull moment. This allowed the pace to be maintained and kept the audience entertained
It was truly one of the more creative and interesting films at the film fest. Since it’s also animated there’s way more that you can do with dynamic scenes Overall, the director, Masaaki Yuasa’s decisions, paid off because it made for an amazing film. Stay tuned for an upcoming interview from our very own Production Director, Megan Atwell, with the director of the film!
