Inu-Oh keeps his face hidden behind a gourd mask. He soon encounters the outcast Inu-Oh (translating to “Dog King” - he’s first seen eating with hounds), a child born with a curse of unknown origin, who is shunned for his physical appearance. Tomona sets out on a solitary journey as a biwa priest, preserving the stories of the Heike through song. Tomona loses his father and his eyesight in what follows, and shortly afterward, he loses his mother to grief as well. As the Ashikaga clan ruthlessly works to secure its power, it quietly buries the Heike clan by controlling its history and censoring stories about it.ĭuring a commissioned dive out at sea for Heike treasure, young Tomona, one of the film’s two leads, finds an artifact that reacts violently to their presence. But while traces of these past projects are felt throughout Inu-Oh, it still feels fresh and inventive as it focuses the director’s quirks into an electrifying revisionist history that’s joyous and tragic at the same time.īased on a novel by Hideo Furukawa (whose modern translation of the Japanese epic Heike Monogatari was the basis for Naoko Yamada’s superb anime adaptation, also with Science Saru), the film is set in 14th-century Japan in the Muromachi period, following the devastating Genpei War of 1180–1185.

Yuasa has done musical sequences before: a psychosexual hallucination in Mind Game, an extended theatrical farce in The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl, a look back at a lost loved one in Ride Your Wave. It’s a psychedelic, bombastic rock opera, but amid all the energy, Yuasa ponders what stories have been lost as society’s more controlling elements attempt to control how art is made and distributed. Exploring a hidden faux-history of art and authoritarianism, Inu-Oh is an exciting, even melancholy exploration of where these two elements overlap and clash. That fast-paced deconstruction and reconstruction of history is just a taste of what’s to come: The movie packs a lot into a compact run time. The Science Saru studio co-founder and director of Keep Your Hands off Eizouken! and Ride Your Wave crosses several centuries in the first minute of Inu-Oh, starting in the modern day and rewinding hundreds of years in one spot, with buildings unmaking themselves in front of viewers’ eyes. Considering the freeform, forward-thinking nature of Masaaki Yuasa’s animated work, it’s funny that his latest film, Inu-Oh, starts by looking backward.

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