While the sunken Heike ships are regularly plundered by gold seekers, their real buried treasure, the movie insists, lies in their wealth of untold, soon-to-be-forgotten stories. (Their conflict was immortalized in the 12th-century epic “The Tale of the Heike” the movie was adapted by Akiko Nogi from Hideo Furukawa’s more recently published novel, “Tales of the Heike: The Inu-Oh Chapters.”) Even as a war rages between the nation’s northern and southern imperial courts, whispered memories persist of the Heike samurai clan, wiped out by their enemies, the Genji, in a furious battle at sea roughly 200 years earlier. One of the concerns of Yuasa’s movie is how conflict and tragedy are enshrined in folklore, and the specific role that artists play in recording, distorting, overlooking and sometimes rescuing history. If that world sounds an awful lot like ours, it is also the politically divided 14th-century Japan against which “Inu-oh” unfolds. Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the CDC and local health officials. The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic. A rich, unstable alloy of history, legend, musical pageantry and cinematic psychedelia, it mounts an argument for mind-expanding, complacency-rattling art in a world that often prefers the opposite. “Inu-oh” offers its own welcome demonstration of this principle. But he also serves as something of a lesson to those he scares off, reminding them that peculiarity is not inherent cause for suspicion or fear. Inu-oh, inspired by a real-life performer of the same name (and voiced by Avu-chan, lead singer and songwriter for the band Queen Bee), here takes the misshapen form of a classic anime grotesque. Two oddly positioned eyes peer out from behind a gourd-shaped mask that hides a face so terrifying, it’s a wonder it doesn’t turn unfortunate onlookers to stone. An ancient Noh dancer born under highly mysterious circumstances, he bursts into the frame on spindly human legs, an overgrown extendable arm flailing behind him like a kite. Like most of the hallucinatory sights and transporting sounds in this feature-length anime, Inu-oh, as he comes to be known, tends to shapeshift in accordance with director Masaaki Yuasa’s whims. The phantom that haunts the eccentric Japanese rock opera “Inu-oh” is not the comeliest of creatures - not at first, anyway.
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