Second life
The biggest reason to be temperate in one's praise of Belle, the newest film by the great animation director Hosoda Mamoru, is that this is extremely similar to a different film by the great animation director Hosoda Mamoru, 2009's Summer Wars (and Summer Wars, in turn, has a reputation for being extremely similar to Hosoda's 2000 featurette Digimon Adventure: Our War Game! But I haven't seen it, so I cannot comment). And I think it would be very hard to make the argument that Belle is the better of the two films on any of the storytelling points where they can be readily compared. Animation-wise, that's a different story, and it gets us in turn to the biggest reason to be giddy and effusive in one's praise of Belle: it's one of the most drop-dead gorgeous animated features to have come out in literally years.
I would frame that as "one of the most gorgeous traditionally animated films" or some such language, except part of what makes Belle so very extraordinary is that it's one of those marvelous films we get every now and then (far more often from Japan than anyplace else, in my experience) that use the different technological platforms and filmmaking methods all bundled together under the big umbrella of "animation" to create some wonderful hybrid creation that's neither traditional nor new, neither hand-drawn nor computer-modeled, but draws on the strengths of all of the above. And this one goes even a touch farther than the many excellent Japanese films to play around in that kind of hybrid form: it also combines Japanese and Western animation approaches. The character designs involved the collaboration of longtime Disney animation Jin Kim and much of the environmental design came from a team on loan from Ireland's Cartoon Saloon, led by that studio's cofounder Tomm Moore. And while the character animation itself was, as far as I can tell, entirely conducted by the employees of Japan's Studio Chizu, the movements and fluid facial expression feel much more "Disney"-style to me, while the poses and visual codes are much more characteristically Japanese.
The second thing is partially explained by the first thing - the most fluid, "Western" characters are all CGI models, painstakingly painted with solid swatches of color and made to look as flat as a sheet of celluloid - but the whole film is built on a structure of dualities and between-two-worlds tensions. The story focuses on a shy teenager named Suzu (Nakamura Kaho), who has been living snugly inside her own head ever since her mother died saving a child from a flooding river. As she arrives in the waning days of high school under-socialised and inexpressive, Suzu finds herself persuaded to join an extremely popular social networking platforum and virtual universe, "U", a place that's kind of just a big bucket for Hosoda to dump whatever things he thinks "the internet" does. So there's streaming video and avatars and influencers and comment sections and personalised walls and God knows what else, and this is all in the form of what certainly appears to be the central hub of ongoing life. I could not tell you how it "works", but Hosoda clearly believes in it, and that's what matters.
Anyway, Suzu creates herself an avatar, with striking swirls of facial lines that resemble freckles and calls the figure "Bell", though this quickly gets picked up as "Belle" once Suzu almost accidentally begins singing in U - she always loved singing but has grown too unsure of herself to keep up with it - and within days hs become one of the biggest pop stars in the world. This ends up putting her in the path of the Dragon (Satoh Takeru), U's most notable troll, and rather than finding him off-putting and mean, she finds herself curious about the apparent wounded soul hiding behind a loutish exterior.
If I were to say here, "it's basically like Beauty and the Beast", I have made no claims that that Belle isn't amply aware of. Indeed, it's not basically like Beauty and the Beast - it's more or less exactly the very specific Disney version of Beauty and the Beast, including multiple shots that are direct replicas of shots from that film (the most noticeable, to me, include the Dragon sagging and cradling his head after he chases Suzu out of his castle, and a swirling 3-D camera moving through a ballroom where Belle and her beast are dancing. I honestly don't have the damnedest idea why. Presumably, it's because Hosoda enjoys Beauty and the Beast, and that's great! I do too! But it's a very weird thing for Belle to hit "pause" on its own narrative about life as digital natives and the double-edged sword of social media to spend one act running through a rushed synopsis of the middle part of the Disney film.
Belle is, in truth, never a particularly elegant piece of storytelling. Besides cramming a fairy tale into its midsection, it keeps changing moods and genres throughout its running time, leading to a remarkably ill-chosen twist late in the second half where it decides to preference a blunt-force shock that will yank us into feeling emotions over treating a difficult, fraught situation with the development and care that would make it seem like a real domestic conflict and not just a gaudy bit of ambulance-chasing. The thing the the script does the best, by far, is to consider the tense balance of Suzu's life online, on the one hand a liberatory experience that allows her to be open and to have passions for the first time since her mother died - literally, giving her a "voice" - and on the other hand a snake pit of jealousy and criticism and having her own private, personal life turned into slop for ravenous pigs. And even this thing is a bit overfamiliar, and its sleek, deft shifting between Physical Life and Digital Life (and Which is "Real Life", Anyway?) is in most ways just borrowed from Summer Wars, where it all felt fresher and smarter.
But, again, what Belle has that even a very well-made and beautiful film like Summer Wars didn't is being just the god-damnedest thing to look at. You have to go at least back to The Red Turtle in 2016 to find the last film that marshaled all of the possibilities of animation into one miraculous visual art object as boldly as this does, and I probably wouldn't stop till we got all the way back to The Tale of the Princess Kaguya in 2013. Belle's game isn't subtle: our lived human reality is all done as more or less normal Japanese animation, while U is a mad whirlwind of bright, ultra-saturated colors slathered across spaces that are simultaneously flat and three-dimensional, designed with the storybook glow of Cartoon Saloon, and populated by gorgeously fluid CGI-animated characters with expressively flat hand-drawn aesthetics. But just because that's literally the most obvious possible way to animated a film about the distinction between the offline and the online selves, that doesn't mean it can't work, and it works so incredibly, unfairly well here. Belle is one of the most gorgeous, fearlessly grandiose animated films in a decade, two decades, who knows how long, marrying 2-D and 3-D movement and animation in an intoxicating, entrancing fantasy of entering a world that really is that much more seductive and engrossing than our own, even as its beauty feels somewhat superficial and artificial. The film's goal isn't to surprise us so much as to completely blow us away it with its non-stop "wow!" factor, and by God, I haven't been this wowed in too long.
I would frame that as "one of the most gorgeous traditionally animated films" or some such language, except part of what makes Belle so very extraordinary is that it's one of those marvelous films we get every now and then (far more often from Japan than anyplace else, in my experience) that use the different technological platforms and filmmaking methods all bundled together under the big umbrella of "animation" to create some wonderful hybrid creation that's neither traditional nor new, neither hand-drawn nor computer-modeled, but draws on the strengths of all of the above. And this one goes even a touch farther than the many excellent Japanese films to play around in that kind of hybrid form: it also combines Japanese and Western animation approaches. The character designs involved the collaboration of longtime Disney animation Jin Kim and much of the environmental design came from a team on loan from Ireland's Cartoon Saloon, led by that studio's cofounder Tomm Moore. And while the character animation itself was, as far as I can tell, entirely conducted by the employees of Japan's Studio Chizu, the movements and fluid facial expression feel much more "Disney"-style to me, while the poses and visual codes are much more characteristically Japanese.
The second thing is partially explained by the first thing - the most fluid, "Western" characters are all CGI models, painstakingly painted with solid swatches of color and made to look as flat as a sheet of celluloid - but the whole film is built on a structure of dualities and between-two-worlds tensions. The story focuses on a shy teenager named Suzu (Nakamura Kaho), who has been living snugly inside her own head ever since her mother died saving a child from a flooding river. As she arrives in the waning days of high school under-socialised and inexpressive, Suzu finds herself persuaded to join an extremely popular social networking platforum and virtual universe, "U", a place that's kind of just a big bucket for Hosoda to dump whatever things he thinks "the internet" does. So there's streaming video and avatars and influencers and comment sections and personalised walls and God knows what else, and this is all in the form of what certainly appears to be the central hub of ongoing life. I could not tell you how it "works", but Hosoda clearly believes in it, and that's what matters.
Anyway, Suzu creates herself an avatar, with striking swirls of facial lines that resemble freckles and calls the figure "Bell", though this quickly gets picked up as "Belle" once Suzu almost accidentally begins singing in U - she always loved singing but has grown too unsure of herself to keep up with it - and within days hs become one of the biggest pop stars in the world. This ends up putting her in the path of the Dragon (Satoh Takeru), U's most notable troll, and rather than finding him off-putting and mean, she finds herself curious about the apparent wounded soul hiding behind a loutish exterior.
If I were to say here, "it's basically like Beauty and the Beast", I have made no claims that that Belle isn't amply aware of. Indeed, it's not basically like Beauty and the Beast - it's more or less exactly the very specific Disney version of Beauty and the Beast, including multiple shots that are direct replicas of shots from that film (the most noticeable, to me, include the Dragon sagging and cradling his head after he chases Suzu out of his castle, and a swirling 3-D camera moving through a ballroom where Belle and her beast are dancing. I honestly don't have the damnedest idea why. Presumably, it's because Hosoda enjoys Beauty and the Beast, and that's great! I do too! But it's a very weird thing for Belle to hit "pause" on its own narrative about life as digital natives and the double-edged sword of social media to spend one act running through a rushed synopsis of the middle part of the Disney film.
Belle is, in truth, never a particularly elegant piece of storytelling. Besides cramming a fairy tale into its midsection, it keeps changing moods and genres throughout its running time, leading to a remarkably ill-chosen twist late in the second half where it decides to preference a blunt-force shock that will yank us into feeling emotions over treating a difficult, fraught situation with the development and care that would make it seem like a real domestic conflict and not just a gaudy bit of ambulance-chasing. The thing the the script does the best, by far, is to consider the tense balance of Suzu's life online, on the one hand a liberatory experience that allows her to be open and to have passions for the first time since her mother died - literally, giving her a "voice" - and on the other hand a snake pit of jealousy and criticism and having her own private, personal life turned into slop for ravenous pigs. And even this thing is a bit overfamiliar, and its sleek, deft shifting between Physical Life and Digital Life (and Which is "Real Life", Anyway?) is in most ways just borrowed from Summer Wars, where it all felt fresher and smarter.
But, again, what Belle has that even a very well-made and beautiful film like Summer Wars didn't is being just the god-damnedest thing to look at. You have to go at least back to The Red Turtle in 2016 to find the last film that marshaled all of the possibilities of animation into one miraculous visual art object as boldly as this does, and I probably wouldn't stop till we got all the way back to The Tale of the Princess Kaguya in 2013. Belle's game isn't subtle: our lived human reality is all done as more or less normal Japanese animation, while U is a mad whirlwind of bright, ultra-saturated colors slathered across spaces that are simultaneously flat and three-dimensional, designed with the storybook glow of Cartoon Saloon, and populated by gorgeously fluid CGI-animated characters with expressively flat hand-drawn aesthetics. But just because that's literally the most obvious possible way to animated a film about the distinction between the offline and the online selves, that doesn't mean it can't work, and it works so incredibly, unfairly well here. Belle is one of the most gorgeous, fearlessly grandiose animated films in a decade, two decades, who knows how long, marrying 2-D and 3-D movement and animation in an intoxicating, entrancing fantasy of entering a world that really is that much more seductive and engrossing than our own, even as its beauty feels somewhat superficial and artificial. The film's goal isn't to surprise us so much as to completely blow us away it with its non-stop "wow!" factor, and by God, I haven't been this wowed in too long.
