Hosoda Mamoru’s Belle centers on a 17-year-old girl, Suzu (Nakamura Kaho), who lives between modern-day Japan and a virtual world called “U,” where millions of users hang out as avatars, or A.S., that are designed from each individual’s biometric information. U displays many of the familiar pitfalls of real-life popular online spaces, from the heightened competitiveness of individuals trying to gain followers to the frequent and excessive cruelty directed at strangers whose opinions or talents people dislike.
The bulk of recent children’s animated films, particularly those from the U.S., tend to regard technology with scorn for such reasons, but especially for being a distraction from everything that really matters in life. New tech is often even positioned as an antagonist in their stories. Hosoda, though, isn’t interested in simply doling out the same old cautionary tale of the potential dangers of virtual realities. And while his depiction of U isn’t without its cynical edge, Belle celebrates the beauty of U’s diversity and its ability to connect people, particularly those who are marginalized or isolated, and allow their hidden gifts to flourish.
The film alternates between the often mundane life of the shy, neurotic Suzu in rural Japan and her sudden, thrilling, and rather unsettling rise to fame in U as a pop singer named Belle. In the process, Hosoda demonstrates the importance and necessity of both of these spaces, shrewdly presenting them as symbiotic, rather than combative, by nature.
Belle’s epic scope, vibrant splashes of color, and wide assortment of comically surrealist characters, including an enormous whale whose multitude of attached speakers pump out Belle’s music as it glides through the digital ether, brings to mind Kon Satoshi’s masterful Paprika. But where Kon’s film delights in reconfiguring and smashing together layers artifice in its dizzying dreamscapes, Belle is more grounded in human emotion.
Years after her mother’s death, Suzu is still coping with the loss, which she internalizes as a form of abandonment, as well as the rift that developed between her and her father (Yakusho Kôji). Her alienation from nearly everyone at her school, aside from her best friend, Hiroka (Ikura), and a childhood friend, Shinobu (Narita Ryô), for whom she still yearns, serves as a stark contrast to her meteoric rise in U. But as her online adventures take her into the orbit of a much-maligned dragon, referred to as the Beast (Satoh Takeru), whom she steps in to protect, her traumatic past and that of the persecuted dragon are elegantly intertwined.
There are echoes in this storyline of Beauty and the Beast, and just when they threaten to become a crutch, Hosoda breaks the mold with clever incorporations. An especially clever one is the white-clad superhero-esque group the Justices, who essentially dox people that they see as a threat to the U. It also serves as an apt metaphor for the duality between the virtual and the tangible, and the massive rift between how we present ourselves and are received in both.
Rather than highlighting the artificiality of this online world, though, Hosoda interrogates its restorative power through its ability to not only give Suzu the chance to literally find her voice, but to connect with the boy behind the beast and bring about palpable, real-world change. For all of Belle’s visually striking action and musical set pieces, it’s the generosity of spirit with which it approaches the modern teenage experience that’s its most impressive attribute.
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