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Unfortunately, there’s a fundamental disconnect between these musical numbers’ raucous energy—specifically how they’re visually represented—and the music that we hear on the soundtrack, possibly because these scenes were first choreographed by Yuasa and then scored by composer Otomo Yoshihide. So while there’s some visual poetry on screen—thanks to the supervision of two Noh supervisors (Keizo Miyamoto and Hirotada Kamei) and one biwa composer (Yukihiro Goto)—it’s not always an intuitive match with the accompanying score, which was also enhanced by Goto’s supervision.
While the musical set pieces are uneven, they also give some essential focus and a much-needed snap to a fairly straightforward story that’s also immediately overwhelmed with expository dialogue. Thankfully, Yuasa is an inspired animation filmmaker, whose romantic view of the past takes clear (and acknowledged) inspiration from “Dororo,” anime godfather Osamu Tezuka’s delirious mid-1960s manga fantasy about a young thief and his companion, a cursed and monstrous-looking young swordsman.
Yuasa plays to his imaginative strengths whenever he develops the tone and dramatic potential of any given moment through rapturous, Tezuka-worthy visual conceits. Early scenes that shows us—sometimes literally—what the world looks like through Inu-oh’s eyes are especially compelling, and so are the better parts of any given musical number, when we see what Noh performers look like according to their rapt audience (and vice versa). Yuasa also seems most inspired whenever he highlights the ungainly features and rough line work that give Matsumoto’s characters their unique, sketch-like charms.
Then again, while Yuasa and Matsumoto’s styles are predictably a good fit—as they are in Yuasa’s anime adaptation of Matsumoto’s Ping Pong comics—Yoshihide’s music doesn’t really enhance or even match the images that it’s meant to illustrate. Noh theater, in any medium, requires audience members to focus on the poetry and emotional nuance of arch and highly physical performances. Yoshhide’s pompous and uninflected rock music unfortunately distracts from the delicacy and precision of these performances.
Other parts of “Inu-Oh” don’t fully cohere, especially courtly/imperial drama that’s meant to establish the period’s political instability. Yuasa’s adaptation of Furukawa’s book is half-thrilling and half-underwhelming.
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