Taylor Alison Swift is an American singer-songwriter. She is known for narrative songs about her personal life, which have received widespread media coverage. At age 14, Swift became the youngest artist signed by the Sony/ATV Music publishing house and, at 15, she signed her first record deal.
Her 2006 eponymous debut album was the longest-charting album of the 2000s in the US. Its third single, "Our Song", made her the youngest person to single-handedly write and perform a number-one song on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. Swift's second album, Fearless, was released in 2008.
Buoyed by the pop crossover success of the singles "Love Story" and "You Belong with Me", it became the US' best-selling album of 2009 and was certified diamond in the US. The album won four Grammy Awards, and Swift became the youngest Album of the Year winner.
‘Inu-oh’ Review: Anime’s Most Out-There Auteur Electrifies the Noh Tradition
variety.comPeter Debruge Chief Film CriticWhat Westerners don’t know about Noh — the classical Japanese theater form in which masked dancers gracefully interpret supernatural tales — could easily fill a 12-hour PBS documentary.
But who wants to watch that? Certainly not the audience renegade anime director Masaaki Yuasa is after with “Inu-oh,” a rowdy punk alternative focusing on two social rejects whose defiantly original performance style broke all the rules and elevated them to rock-star status, only to be (all but) forgotten by history.Among the most unpredictable artists of his medium, Yuasa specializes in trippy, off-the-wall anime features such as “Mind Game” and “Night Is Short, Walk On Girl” that recall the work of psychedelic toonsmith Ralph Bakshi at his anti-establishment extreme (“Coonskin,” “Wizards”).
Of all the filmmakers now working in Japan, Yuasa is the last one fans would expect to show an interest in the rigorously rule-based world of Noh — until it clicks that his interest lies in subverting the style’s rigid codes and conventions.
Basically, “Inu-oh” is to Noh as spray-painted graffiti is to traditional Japanese calligraphy. Set six centuries ago during the Muromachi period, when Noh had not yet crystallized into its current form, “Inu-oh” imagines how two fatherless young men — blind biwa player Tomona (Mirai Moriyama) and hideous outcast Inu-oh (voiced by gender-fluid Japanese rocker Avu-chan, lead singer of the group Queen Bee) — stunned the establishment by being true to themselves.
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