BELLE

Unlike most people in the anime fandom, I didn't really get into Mamoru Hosoda's movies until later. But he's certainly been making a name for himself over the past decade and a half. I first started out with Summer Wars, which I liked, and one of my college classes showed The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, which I thought was just okay. I also liked Wolf Children, haven't seen Boy and The Beast, and Mirai was okay but its concept doesn't really translate well considering the age of its protagonist. I did see the Digimon movies he directed once upon a time, albeit in the mercilessly censored American dub Digimon The Movie. But Hosoda's 2021 offering, Belle, promised to be his most ambitious movie yet. With character designs by famous Disney animator Jin Kim, and backgrounds done by Cartoon Saloon, the company that made movies such as Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea, and Wolfwalkers, there was a lot of buzz and a lot of hype. Having seen it though, this movie really tries, it really tried, but I think its ambition ultimately was its biggest undoing.

The story centers on a girl named Suzu, who is still reeling from her mother's death years ago. Her relationship with her father is strained, she isolates herself from her friends, and she can no longer engage in the one passion she has, singing, because it reminds her too much of her mother, who cultivated her love of singing, and thus, trying to sing makes her throw up. But a friend of hers tells her about a virtual computer world called U, where she can take on a customized avatar and be whoever and whatever she wants to be. Entranced, Suzu takes on the persona of a pink-haired songstress named Belle, whose singing is at first criticized and panned, but slowly becomes a viral sensation. But one of her online concerts is interrupted by a strange, monstrous beast avatar, simply called The Beast, who's infamous in U for being a troublemaker. But Belle find herself interested in the Beast and learning more about him.

The movie focuses mainly on two things: The world of U, where Belle gets to know the beast and finds herself being targeted by the administrators who want to kill him because of his shenanigans, and Suzu's life in the real world. Honestly, though, U itself is pretty much the source of the movie's biggest problems. How is U even supposed to work? Is it a deep dive simulation similar to VR, or is it like a console video game? Do the people who use U interact with it like you would in a VR game, or do they just sit at their computers? Nothing about U makes any sense at all, and the movie refuses to really go into how U really works, just treating it like a generic fantasy world and having things happen just because the plot demands it. Say what you will about Sword Art Online and all of its issues, but SAO at the very least established that the characters have to sleep and have headgear on to interact with everything within the video games they're playing, because the games in question are deep dive virtual reality games. Belle makes the case that U is a heavily futurized version of the internet, similar to what Summer Wars did with Oz, but because it has the characters connect with U via earbuds, it doesn't explain how the avatars are even supposed to work, or whether the people in real life are interacting with U's environment through their avatars or not. Even Summer Wars, as nonsensical as its premise could be at times, at the very least established that much! Also, U's app icon is literally just the Uber app icon. How lazy can you get? And the movie establishes that AIs apparently exist, but the AI characters in question are little more than the Beast's gatekeepers.

But the ridiculousness of U's setting isn't the only problem Belle has. There are times when the movie feels really bloated, like it's trying to do too much at once. We have Suzu's grief over her mother, the mystery of just who the Beast is in real life, U in and of itself, some romance shenanigans between some of Suzu's classmates, the Beast's eventual reveal, and so on. It feels like all of these things are constantly warring with one another, fighting for equal amounts of screen time, and as a result, they all feel half-baked, with the stuff in U suffering the most. The movie is two hours long, but it feels like it needed more time to flesh out all of its subplots and core concepts. This also results in a lot of really strange writing decisions, especially for the ending, that come across as way too cheesy and melodramatic for my liking, almost coming off like a half-baked Hallmark film. Seriously, Belle could have worked better had it cut out at least one or two of these subplots, and it'd be much more streamlined in the process. Finally, let's talk about Justin. He, along with U, is the biggest dark spot on this movie. What even is the point of this character? He's literally nothing more than a Saturday morning cartoon villain whose only purpose is to antagonize the characters for no reason, even though they're doing nothing but minding their own business. Did he really even need to exist? Justin feels like a villain shoved into the movie just for the sake of having a villain, when the movie could have worked so much better without him. He almost feels like a rip-off of Gaston shoved into a Buzz Lightyear costume, and the movie makes absolutely no effort to really develop him as a character beyond his misguided villainy. He serves no purpose other than to cause unnecessary conflict, and the whole movie would have been better off if he were cut out.

Alright, that's all the bad stuff. Now let's talk about the good stuff, starting with the usual things Hosoda excels at. Suzu's a decent protagonist who develops nicely throughout the movie, and many of the side characters were actually pretty fun and had genuinely well executed arcs of their own, even if they don't get to do much. I only wish we got to know more about Peggie Sue, one of the U singers who starts off shallow at first but then comes to support Suzu/Belle in her time of need. The animation done by Hosoda's Studio Chizu is still top notch, and the CGI, while not as fluid and textured as, say, Lupin The 1st and Dragon Quest: Your Story, is still fairly solid, and I like that Hosoda limited the CGI to just being used in U. The soundtrack is obviously a banger, as this is a movie very heavy on music, and I did genuinely like all the songs. It's clear that Hosoda and his team really tried to go all out for this one, but I don't think this movie was able to carry the weight of all that ambition it had, as it could have easily been better had it cut out a lot of the more extraneous subplots, expanded on certain characters and how they develop, and streamlined it more. And get rid of Justin. He was just pointless.

Sorry Hosoda-san. I really wanted to like this more than I did, and for what it's worth, Belle does have some genuinely good stuff going for it. But it suffers from being too ambitious for its own good, and becoming too bloated as a result.