Belle

Hot off the high from his first Oscar nomination for 2018's Mirai, Japanese director Mamoru Hosoda returns with a touching virtual-reality riff on the classic beauty and the beast tale. But don't let the familiar source material lull you into a false sense of security; Hosoda is not playing it safe just because he has a reliable tale to fall back on. In fact, after years of constant comparison to the films of Studio Ghibli and their unrivaled consistency and pedigree, it seems like the Oscar nomination may have renewed some confidence and ambition back into the veteran director.

Like The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, this film follows another likable teenage protagonist, Suzu who, unfortunately, is unbearably grief-stricken after the death of her mother when she was six. After over a decade of lament, Suzu still has trouble understanding why her mother would put herself in the position that led to her untimely death. She often finds herself crying uncontrollably, only able to compose herself time and time again with the help of her longtime friend, Hiro.

Suzu's relationship with her mother is portrayed through many wordless montages, only accompanied by the gorgeous work of the film's trio of composers, Taisei Iwasaki, Ludvig Forssell, and Yuta Bandoh. As devastating as it is to lose her mother, Suzu's grief is amplified by her own inability to find her singing voice again after the tragedy, despite her efforts. The despair and loneliness she deals with on a daily basis eventually lead her to try U, a new virtual universe that already totals over 5 billion users.

U's technology works by conducting a biometric scan of its user, then creating a personalized avatar. For Suzu, her avatar appears as a beautiful and slender woman with pink hair, really only recognizable as Suzu due to the splash of freckles underneath her eyes. Once in cyberspace, the urge is irresistible. Suzu begins to sing-- And she sings beautifully. So beautifully in fact that it is only a matter of days before Suzu finds herself with millions of followers, all ready to pack virtual auditoriums as Suzu gives performances under the moniker of Belle.

Described by Hosoda as "the one I've been wanting to make," the giddiness of a director finally allowed to make their long-gestating dream project is palpable onscreen, particularly in the film's virtual world sequences. In the real world, the animation is classic hand-drawn work, but in U, Hosoda translates the world's infinite possibilities into a spectacularly dynamic CG landscape, complete with a kinetic camera that swirls and moves in ways only possible in an animated world.

If none of this so far sounds like the beauty and the beast you know and love, don't worry. The "beast" of this tale makes his grand appearance right at the end of the first act as he crashes through a giant dome that acted as a venue for one of Belle's performances. A figure only known as "The Dragon" is seen being pursued by self-proclaimed "Justices" of U. Though he is said to be wildly aggressive and ruining the sanctity of U, Belle immediately believes there is more to him than meets the eye, recognizing a pain that she herself has seen before. Intrigued by The Dragon, Belle suspends any future performances and instead devotes her time to discovering the identity of and connecting more with the mysterious beast.

Outside of U, Suzu must balance her newfound stardom online with the meek reputation she has with real-life friends and classmates. Where the usual high school relationships and drama could, in the hands of a less skilled director, grind the imagination and creativity shown thus far to a halt, Hosoda surprisingly manages to make the grounded portions of his film just as engaging and playful as the virtual primarily by mining the material for a surprising amount of laughs.

Where the film does falter a bit is with its final act, and while the two storylines are engaging in their own right, there is a feeling that they are too dissimilar to one another to possibly connect in a believable way by the end. And for the most part, this is true. The film employs some eye-rolling contrivances in its race-against-the-clock finale, but when the last scene's emotions hit and Suzu fully blossoms into the strong woman she knows she is, the machinations that led the film to that point are largely forgivable.

When all is said and done, it is not going to be the final moments that stick with you from Belle. It's going to be the wonder and visual inventiveness of the virtual sequences -- the sprawling endlessness of the online world and the guiding hand of a director keen on pushing his film beyond that. Hosoda may have spent much of his career in the shadow of the great Studio Ghibli, but with Belle, he certainly makes the most of his chance at the spotlight.

Let's get it right from the start. This movie does have faults - the plot does lose its relation to common sense some times (at least once, but in a very key moment) and it does sink a few times in to very shallow cliché such as the basic premise of the virtual world which makes this story move - translating our inner qualities into a singular personal avatar that really represent who we are. But once again I find myself watching a movie, realizing it has faults and feeling these faults don't matter one bit. I rated it 8 stars but it felt much more like 9. Because Mamoru Hosoda understands the human soul like very few do. I've seen already one of his earlier films - Mirai No Mirai where the very same deep understanding is demonstrated, I rated it 9 but I must admit this movie was much more moving than Mirai. Because the earlier movie is much more analytical and easy to relate to intellectually, while this one works on a pure emotional level. I'm rarely moved by an animated film like I was while watching it, because the characters were real - it has a lot to do with the superb Japanese voice acting, I'm not sure it'll work so well when dubbed but in Japanese it was raw and real and spoke of real issues of grief as a formative experience and about learning to stand for your beliefs against overwhelming odds and about how the smallest support from one's friends can mean the world and work wonders.

One more point that wasn't made by the previous reviewers - it's called Belle (in English) because it's using the French La Belle et la Bete as a major point of reference. It's not Beauty and the Beast in a straight forward manner but the idea of Beauty's love as a releasing power is at the core of the movie. See it and you'll see what I mean, because I won't be adding on that issue.

Never tell anyone that you can't heap on the empathy in virtual reality by singing incredibly sappy and cheesy pop songs...

There's a part of me that wants to rate this even higher, or even possibly lower. At times this is staggeringly gorgeous - and I'm not sure if I'm in a minority opinion that the scene scenes taking place in the real world are much more eye catching and appealing than those in the U Dimension (except for the climax, where it walks a tightrope of like Care Bears energy and one of the most heart-soaring moments in modern film, but again animated with emotional gusto, like that thing at the end of movies where everyone is there to applaud/say goodbye to the hero) - and at other times it's that mopey-dopey teenage girl stuff that's not my thing. Have you ever seen an Anime where the teenage heroine freaks out because (gasp) a boy maybe looked her way or (extra gasp) people may know who she is from a virtual reality world in the real one? Lots of that here.

It's also completely open about it being so all-in on being Cornball and I admire and was involved by that. It may not address abuse and trauma and even grief necessarily in the most mature or well-rounded sense, but who would my old ass be to argue or look down if some young kid or teen somewhere found the messages about overcoming such rancid figures productive and meaningful (in real life as well as the web which is where all the horrors of the world multiply)?

It manages to use the main empathetic meat of Beauty and the Beast, primarily the Disney one (they even copy, brilliantly, that one image of the Beast showing regret after kicking Belle out), while not making it so verbatim it neglects its own characters. I guess this is to say if an anime has to do an homage to that, might as well do it with a pop singer and a giant dragon!

I'm not sure if it's great overall, and it's message about a daughter following in a mother's moral footprint is heavy - if, again, presented with a go for broke attitude for its emotional compass (this is BIG, and it's fitting if possible to see it in IMAX as I was lucky to do). I also wonder if it could bother to reckon with people living as a New Body in U. But I'll surely remember that little and pivotal scene where Suzu comes up with the song and how that is animated and edited is staggeringly good.

I really thought the animation was great and I loved a lot of the stylistic choices. A lot of the ideas involving the internet and music were also very cool. There is just A LOT going on with the story. There's a lot of elements of Beauty and the Beast, The Matrix, and other ideas and I don't feel like they always came together smoothly. All in, I'm happy to have watched it.

Spectacular visuals and animation but narrative is disjointed, particularly in the latter half of the film. Set up and themes don't quite land. Weak story.