Rookie-Critic's Top 25 Films of 2022:
#21: Inu-Oh (dir. Masaaki Yuasa)
Japanese anime director Masaaki Yuasa is the mind behind some of the most highly regarded anime films & shows of the last decade, with TV credits like Ping Pong: The Animation, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken, and Netflix's Devilman: Crybaby, and film credits including Lu Over the Wall, Ride Your Wave, and The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl. He has a style that is unmistakably his own and his stories are as engaging as they are visually arresting. Yuasa said that Inu-Oh would possibly be his last project for awhile, so how does he send the golden era of his career off? Why, with a rock opera set in Feudal Japan, of course! The story of two friends fighting back against the authority that seeks to keep them from doing what they love, Inu-Oh takes its time with its forward momentum, and doesn't mind halting everything every now and then for a series of musical numbers that mix more traditional Japanese instruments (the biwa, mainly) with more modern songwriting styles to create some truly unique and inspiring sequences, not to mention the animation is truly beautiful. That alone is enough to give Inu-Oh all the points it needed to make the list, the rest is just a wonderful bonus.
(Also, just an aside, I do generally watch the English dub of anime, but for this one in particular I would HIGHLY recommend watching it in the original Japanese. The performances are stellar and fit much better with the songs.)
Currently streaming on Hulu.
Read my full review of Inu-Oh here
Goodbye, Don Glees! (2022, dir. Atsuko Ishizuka) - review by Rookie-Critic
Goodbye, Don Glees! really sneaked up on me. As you can probably tell, I've kind of made it a habit over the past year to go see anything and everything that even kind of interests me. So, when I saw ads for the very limited Fathom Events showing of this unassuming anime film, I just decided to go for it. No trailer, no plot synopsis, just a poster and a title, and I am so glad I did. Goodbye, Don Glees! follows three friends (Roma, Toto, and Drop, three incredibly anime names) during their first summer as high schoolers. Through a few different misadventures, they find themselves trekking off into the deep woods surrounding their rural Japanese hometown to find a drone that flew way off course. Now, a drone isn't a dead body, and there are only three of them, but you can tell this film is heavily inspired by Stand by Me and other childhood adventure films of that time period, and it wears those inspirations well. The first half of the film is entertaining and fun, and sets up its trio of protagonists slowly. Letting their interactions do the talking, and allowing the interpersonal relationships between all three kids to build up their characters and backstories naturally and evenly.
There is a fairly predictable plot point in the movie that seems like something that normally would have been kept more secret until the third act of any other movie, but by the time all the puzzle pieces start to slide into place you hardly care about how predictable or unsurprising anything is because you realize that isn't really important. The point was never the reveal, but what that specific thing means to the character it's pertinent to, and how that in turn affects his companions. This film is emotionally vulnerable, and finds ways to tug at your heartstrings in the third act that, while you may have seen coming, still hit you like a freight train when the needle finally drops, and I will admit to crying a good amount in the film's final moments. I feel a little bad devoting so little text to this review while my review for a film like Clerks III reads like a research paper, but I had a lot of different and complicated thoughts on Clerks. That's not to say that Goodbye, Don Glees! isn't a film worthy of deep critical analysis, but the thing is this; falling in love with Goodbye, Don Glees! was easy. The humor worked, the emotional parts worked, the characters worked, everything about this film simply just worked. It's an amazingly moving film that currently sits as my favorite animated film of 2022, and it has set the bar pretty damn high.
Score: 10/10
Currently available to rent or purchase on digital (iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, etc.) and to pre-order on DVD & Blu-ray through Shout Factory.
