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Been watching up to episode 4 hoping a semblance of a plot would finally emerge, but if the anime does not feel the need to do so inside the first third of the series, I guess I won't find it later.
Nothing against slice of life or episodic narration but I wish things were at least entertaining and with a tiny bit of action, humour, a thrill, some depth in the characters.
It's been four episodes of the same people in the same place doing and saying the same little harmless things. What I find strange to the point of being eerie is the lack of ... backstory for any character. They're just there, we don't know where they're from, why they're learning at this school, how they got to form their 5 member group.. they just roam the sunny empty halls of this castle and spend the hours chitchatting about the fluffiness of their breakfast pancakes. I find it.. a nice horror setting, I gotta say.
That's why I was itching for something dramatic to happen that would set things in motion, but all those foreshadowing scary clips of a distant danger just don't fool me anymore.
It's just bait for Puella Magi fans who keep watching wishing hard that shit will eventually go down.. but when it does, who will care? We are forced to stare at these girls and their behavioral tropes for hours without a chance to ever actually see them as people, humans with hopes and fears we could relate to.
And I frankly cannot see how these episodes of shallow pastimes can count as nakama building and memories one could look back to fondly and use as plot pivot.
Anyway, guess I'm asking too much from the adaptation of a cellphone sol game.
Animation is sleek and inviting, great production value, almost wasted considering this lack of content.
A thing this anime is actually good for is to unironically put you to sleep if you cannot get rest. Just put it on and it will do anything to make you forget about it.

Inu ou can be a very good movie if you go into it with an open mind.

I watched it a year ago at the Venice Biennale. It was the only Japanese animated entry of the festival, which happened to screen somewhat close to where I lived. I went there just to see it thinking that no matter what, even if I wouldn't get the story at least I would let my eyes feast on what looked like the next great feat of animation, provided by such an indie and original studio as SCIENCE SARU, known for jewels like Devil Man Cry Baby and later ... Heike Monogatari.

What I got was the complete opposite.
Even if I didn't get it completely, the story was heartrendingly beautiful and well executed, while the animation.. well I would not have paid the full ticket just for that. No Makoto Shinkai level of detail for sure, but not even the elegance seen in previous features like the Night is Short.
It has a gritty, almost dirty, yet precise style that nevertheless manages to perfectly portray the vibe of a story revolving around the poor and outcast. Realistic and vibrant, with uncensored sweat and spit and bodily hair which is pretty refreshing to see in the contemporary hyper-idealised anime landscape. The character design and the action is great, bold, intense.
What did not sit with me was the conspicuous use of frame recycling. There were many instances where the scene is exactly the same and just the color or the context change, while the animation goes in a loop.
But allow me a little digression. I need to mention how this anime is, first and foremost, a musical. It is a story told almost entirely through musical lines, like a biwa player singing in the streets used to do.
There is an incredible amount of time (like 10+ minutes) in multiple sections throughout the movie dedicated to the full development of a song, which makes it feel as if you were really witnessing a rock concert in real time. The music the two protagonists craft with just their voice and a biwa pimped to electric guitar has a visceral, universal allure that will probably make you hum the lyrics while clapping your hands to the beat. If you like festival folk music you'll have a blast and will be avle to grasp what I think is the most important message in the movie: how the power of music and art unites people through the ages, through their differences, through their struggle against society and against fate.
Just like the development of the folklore fairytale it is based upon, the story and the music in this movie go through a repetition with variations scheme until they gradually reach a climax. It's an elementary old way of treading a story, something I only remember hearing in my grandparents bedtime stories or some Grimm Brothers. Not the kind you'd expect in an anime. Which is probably what makes Inu Ou a unique viewing experience.
I deeply appreciated this decision to honor the forgotten ways, but to come back to my point, I still felt like I was being cheated on a bit in terms of the looping animation. Was it laziness, lack of finances or time? Or was it done on purpose for full coherence in all facets of the medium? In that case I could accept it, as radical and weird as it feels.

In all other aspects Inu Ou is successfully fleshing out character dynamics and their ambitions, the clashes within society and the politics of that historical period that so often tend to blend into myth.
More than anything, it reveals how magic is intimately connected to human psychology and spirituality.
And that sometimes, what originates a legend is the sheer energy turned sacrality of certain extraordinary instants we live in our ordinary life.

Spoilers ahead!

I’m really struggling in rating this show because emotionally I’m pretty sold on the concept (or what I’ve idealised it to be) but objectively I’ve found way too many problems with the story to feel like I could recommend it to a friend, so I’d settle for 7 instead of 8.

Initially I had good expectations. The trailer looked fresh and promising: Isekai that doesn’t have a reincarnated weeb as MC? Badass-looking, all-female cast with understated romance? Let's go!!
I was blown away by the twist in the first episode and the overall dynamics until the third. The action was good and the flashbacks had this ... awesome lore vibe to them so I was just hyped, like “this is the anime of the season!” kind of hype.
Then I got the third episode where they take the train ride, and it all went down the drain. The pacing got slow and stayed like that until the end of the season, the dialogues never took off and stayed tropey and empty and the action sequences got suddenly limp and watered down, as if they were trying to stretch the story inside one episode where half of it would have been enough. When I thought a climax was approaching they’d just speak their lines slower to fill up some more minutes and let things take the most obvious route.

Maybe it’s the restricted cast that makes it difficult to keep things dynamic action-wise? Then a good writer would focus on the interaction between characters, with real dialogues and exposition. But, nah, let’s go shopping and bitch over why you are buying that ribbon for your long time friend and not for me, a random girl you’ve just met and you’re secretly supposed to kill!
Akari starts out like a harmless airhead but increasingly turns into a needy spoiled brat that likes to hog Menou’s attention and cause drama for no reason at all. We are given a glimpse of her redeeming backstory far too late in the show, and even with that knowledge it’s hard to justify her childish codependent behaviour.
Paradoxically, Momo ends up on the better side, because even as a love-addicted psycho she still shows more sense than Akari and many times comes to take the role of the straight man.
Menou on the other hand is almost funny in her sheltered naivety and how she works as a magnet-pacifier of the triangle. Her lack of personality and ductility is what defines her and it works, but what happens after the midseason climax with the archbishop incident makes it pretty clear her character is not handled properly. You receive massive revelations about this girl whom you’re somehow connected with by fate but instead of talking it out or having a change in your interactions with her, well, you just carry on as if nothing happened, because you just gotta complete your mission, right? Right. What mission again?

Too little info is given about whatever else is going on in the world or simply how the Church reacted to ahem, the Archbishop blowing up. Ashuna also stays in the backburner and there’s not one glimpse of a reason provided for why she keeps showing up other than, well, because she just damn feels like it. The focus seems to be just on the love cocoon between Dumb and Dumber, but even that is not convincing.
Akari is outrageously flirty out of the blue, which could work as a love-comedy expedient sometimes, but she’s always blown off by Menou’s icy cluelessness as if it was a children's tantrum. Thankfully Momo at least is able to see what could be happening but yeah, in twelve episodes nothing remotely yuri ever happens, just a set of cliche suggestive moments that resolve in goofy comedy. Not a single proper blushing face, no tension, just a lot of head pats from Menou as her seal of sisterly camaraderie. Towards the end it becomes almost heartwarming as Menou relaxes a bit but the romance tag is totally a bait, which is disappointing, especially given the massive shipping potential of those beautiful OP and ED. Hopefully something substantial will come up in later seasons.

Speaking of OP, I love how good the animation is and how sometimes that is reflected in the episodes as well, with good photography and even sakuga in some battles and critical moments like the flashbacks. Unfortunately many other times the quality slips towards the lower end and I remember witnessing a whole episode made up of basically just four frames and looping animation for entire minutes. Heartbreaking.

Sound-wise the BGM is good in that it mostly complements the situations nicely whether they be ambiguous and sneaky or fiery and dramatic, although there was not a wide range of different themes. Sound effects are juicy and materialise well the power of magic and enchantments.

Overall, it feels like I was tricked into buying a cosmetic product with awesome sensual packaging but zero actual effectiveness, that I nevertheless keep on putting on every morning because I want to hope one day it’ll magically start working.

Weird analogy aside, this is a show that could have been great with its original, enticing premises, but ended up average and unsatisfying due to poor writing and lack of depth.
Maybe it’s just very very slow?
I want to hope so.

My first movie in full CGI. It was high quality, and though I really felt like a videogame at times, there were moments were I realised that yes, there are things that you simply couldn't do with traditional animation, like the small swaying of bodies, the split second microexpressions. They took great care in the animation and the choice of cast was also stellar. Story-wise, it had an interesting beginning and build up and the dystopian settings were intriguing. Unfortunately it unraveled towards the end and they rushed everything into a jumble of very Evangelion-esque tropes, which was quite disappointing. The characters also seemed to ... lack depth, and had tragedy that was just touched upon to justify their reactions but lacked exposure. It might have worked better as a series, imo.

I had to drop it after 15 minutes because the animation is atrocious. How Netflix had the nerve to hype the shit out of this is beyond me. The beginning sequence is okay and the mixing of traditional animation and CGI is not problematic. But the airport scene is just bad, bad in every shot: disproportionate drawings, derpy faces and janky animation. It's not something you would expect in 2022 and not from a producer that clearly has enough money to make decent things when they want (e.g. Yasuke, Vampire in the Garden). Story could be interesting to listen to but this is simply unwatchable.

Visually great anime. Fresh and popping animation, Trigger at its best, oversaturated summer frenzy vibes.

Really nice and exotic music that adds a lot to the aesthetic allure.

Story wise is quite good, mostly character driven.

If you've watched AnoHana you'll soon be able to guess, without even checking, that it was written by the same author. Same concept, only in a sci-fi context.
Much more drama and love dynamics between the teenage characters, sometimes to the point of being histeric, but in a cathartic way. Even though some pairings were a bit pushed in my opinion.

Very short but intense, great as an original anime.

Dropped it at episode 6 after realising I was practically forcing myself to watch it.
Guess if I can't find a glimpse of enjoyment past the first half of an anime, it's not really worth it.
The only thing I honestly liked and that lured me in for a while was the opening, beautiful song and well executed animation.

I was extremely confused by the lack of character and context presentation and the non-linear narrative of the first episodes. If it had been just that though, I would have actually been thrilled to know more and praised the unique directing.
What did not convince me was all the rest. ...
The people in the story had this very monotone, uninteresting or frankly ugly design that was coupled with either boring dialogue or jarring statements. From the very beginning there’s a bunch of characters that are thrown to us and swiftly removed before we even begin to recognise their faces.
What was most uncomfortable to me was the lack of a main character, or rather the lack of a stable point of view. It’s unclear who the narrator of the first episodes is, and the sense of being left behind only amplifies in the second arc of the anime: new characters out of the blue, unclear character hierarchy (Is this the main character of the new arc? No wait, we’re getting a monologue from this girl now.. But this is all narrated from that other background character’s point of view??), the previous arc and its consequences are as good as gone.
I’m not asking for spoon-fed narration but at times it really felt like watching a theatre rehearsal through a keyhole, an incomprehensible, unrelatable sequence of disconnected clips.

This to me is an unsuccessful execution of that typical novel structure involving lots of dialogue and slow building before an intense, action filled arc epilogue.
Bakemonogatari, for example, comes from and it’s even inspired by the same kind of novel, but it’s worlds apart in terms of anime adaptation. An anime is meant to be watched, and you can’t demand uninterrupted attention and focus from the viewer without giving them a little bit of visual entertainment and pacing. Otherwise you’re be much better off producing an audiobook instead.
I get that in the Monogatari series we also see a constant effort in the script in order to be entertaining and light, which does not fit the atmosphere of this anime instead. And yet, I’ve watched verbose, monologue laden mistery-horror anime (such as Shinsekai Yori), that through music, photography, and editing made even the most mind boggling lines go by smoothly and even made you forget about some questionable handling of the storyline.

It might be I’m missing the whole point of this anime, but even though I tried, I failed to connect with it in any way, cognitively, emotionally or even just aesthetically, so I’ll end it here.

P.S. Huge letdown with the bait PV. Very little connection with the anime stylistically.