98 min | PG-13 | August 12, 2022 | GKIDS
A blind biwa player and a deformed dancer become rock stars in fourteenth-century Japan. They turn forgotten ghost stories into stadium spectacle. The dead want their songs sung, and these two are screaming them into the night.
Inu-Oh is a musical set in medieval Japan about two outcasts who build a sensation from the stories nobody else will tell. Tomona is a blind biwa player who lost his sight to a cursed sword. Inu-Oh is a dancer born monstrous and hidden behind a gourd mask by a father ashamed of him. They meet, they perform, and the spirits of the slain Heike clan flow through their music. The film is about who controls history and what the powerful do to artists who give voice to the forgotten dead.
Avu-chan voices Inu-oh with a feral energy that turns each performance into exorcism. The character sheds a piece of his deformity every time the crowd roars, and Avu-chan tracks that transformation through pure vocal force. Mirai Moriyama plays Tomona with a quieter ache, a boy chasing his father’s ghost through every song he sings. The dynamic between the two carries the film. One performer howls at the heavens and the other narrates the cost.
Masaaki Yuasa directs from a screenplay by Akiko Nogi, adapted from Hideo Furukawa’s novel. Yuasa stages the concert sequences as anachronistic rock shows, with Inu-oh swinging from bridges and walking on water while a medieval audience surges like a modern crowd. The animation stretches and warps bodies in motion, refusing the clean lines of conventional anime. Nogi’s structure frames the whole story as a courtroom confession delivered centuries later. The film cuts between that solemn account and the riotous spectacle it describes.
Inu-Oh argues that art remembers what authority wants erased, and that remembering it carries a price. The shogunate sanctions one official version of the Heike story and crushes the rest. Tomona and Inu-oh sing the banned variations and pay for it. Yuasa keeps the energy reckless even as the stakes turn fatal. The result is a film about the dead refusing to stay quiet and the living who lend them a stage.