In the past, I’ve described a lot of Mamoru Hosoda’s films as being two films in one. Both Summer Wars and Wolf Children are, to some extent, exercises in duality, telling two separate stories and attempting to weave them together so they feel like a single, cohesive whole. It’s a difficult narrative technique to pull off, and as evidenced by Summer Wars, Hosoda isn’t always able to do so. Then again, Wolf Children’s bifurcated narrative is a big part of the reason why it’s such a staggering masterpiece, so it’s not entirely outside his wheelhouse. But The Boy and the Beast is by far the most extreme example of this “two films in one” approach I’ve seen from him yet, and sadly, that’s not to its benefit. Throughout its first half, this movie is a charming, delightful fantasy tale, something more akin to classic Disney storytelling than I’ve seen from most anime. But once it crosses the halfway point, it takes a wild swerve down a very different path and rapidly goes off the rails. The film’s simple charms are lost in a whirlwind of misplaced ambition, and what could have been another excellent Hosoda film is instead left as a disappointing half-measure.

The story starts off with Ren, a boy who’s on the run. His mother just died in a car accident, his father divorced them long ago and is nowhere to be found, and his closest relatives just aren’t very nice people, so he’s taken to the streets, trying to hide from his pain and eke out a life on his own. But out of nowhere, he’s approached by a beastman from the world of beasts that exists parallel to ours, a sort-of spirit world steeped in classic Shinto iconography and populated with intelligent, humaniod animals. This particular beastman is a bear-like fellow named Kumatetsu, a hothead who’s quick to anger and is severely lacking in people skills. He’s in contention to be the next lord of the beast world, and he’s certainly got the skills for it, but his wild temper and bad attitude scare everyone away. So the current lord has issued him a challenge: if Kumatetsu can prove his worth as a leader by taking on an apprentice and training him well, he can remain in consideration to be the next lord. And after scaring a bunch of potential apprentices away, he’s finally decided, hell with it, might as well take on a human apprentice if no other options are left.

At first, Ren doesn’t like Kumatetsu one bit. He sees the ill-tempered bear man as just one more rotten adult who can’t help him. And Kumatetsu is equally grouchy over Ren’s disobedience. But circumstances have left them with no other option but to trust each other and try to work together, so Ren leaves the human world behind and begins living with Kumatetsu in the beast world. As time goes on, they form an increasingly healthy father-son dynamic as they both each other in their own ways. Kumatetsu teaches Ren to be strong and have faith in his own abilities, Ren teaches Kumatetsu to be a better teacher and get better at communicating with others. And slowly but surely, they begin to fill the hole in each other’s hearts, giving each other the human connection- or beastman connection, I suppose- they were previously lacking. Their bond is the heart of The Boy and the Beast, and through the movie’s first half, that heart is beating strong as hell. Watching them slowly open up to each other is really charming, and it’s peppered with fantastic moments as we see their mutual abrasiveness push each other to get back up when they fall down and not let despair swallow them. Like I mentioned above, it really does feel like a classic Disney movie; even Kumatetsu’s exaggerated character animation is very reminiscent of another titular movie beast, albeit with much more comic flair. I was down to jive with that energy all the way to the end.

But then we reach the movie’s halfway point, and things get very odd very fast. We timeskip several years to the point where Ren is seventeen and his bond with Kumatetsu has solidified, and then a bunch of stuff... happens all of a sudden. Suddenly the movie starts caring about Ren’s human half and he starts paying visits to the human world. He meets a girl his age named Kaede and she’s almost instantly fast-tracked into being his female friend/love interest/support system for manpain. Out of nowhere, the story stops being about Ren’s bond with Kumatetsu and becomes about his lingering abandonment trauma, which in this world manifests as literal dark magic that humans can use when they let negative emotions overcome them. And it does that same stupid thing the Gurren Lagann timeskip did where it takes a background character who’s maybe had five lines of dialogue up until this point and says “Okay, this guy is evil now and he’s gonna be your antagonist.” Which means the story has to retrofit an explanation for why this guy suddenly matters so much because it didn’t properly set him up beforehand, and then the climax turns into this bizarre battle in the middle of Tokyo’s streets with a shadowy whale wreaking havoc and Ren trying to use his own inner darkness to defeat his opponent’s inner darkness, and if I’m being honest, I had checked out well before we reached that point.

I don’t mean to sound glib about it, but the change of direction is so fast and so unexpected that it really does feel like so much of the second half comes out of nowhere. Over the course of the final hour, The Boy and the Best strays so far from its emotional core that it no longer feels like the same story it started as. I get what it’s going for in terms of theme: Ren could have easily fallen into despair just like the ultimate villain does because of how he was abandoned, but he’s able to triumph and save himself because of the countless people who supported him along he way, giving him the strength to fill the hole in his heart that was left there as a child so long ago. But so little of this was actually set up in the first half; our focus was almost entirely on the strength of Kumatetsu and Ren’s developing relationship. So the second half pretty much has to become an entirely different film and jam all these developments into too short a time frame, yanking us away from the story we actually cared about in the process. Kumatetsu does eventually play an important role in the finale, but by then we’ve strayed so far off course that my investment just couldn’t recover. If Hosoda wanted to tell this story, he would’ve been better served expanding this movie into a full TV series. Even just twelve episodes would have been plenty to develop all these ideas more fully and massage them more naturally into a single cohesive narrative. Awkwardly shoved together here, it just feels like we’re abandoning the movie we signed up for halfway through in favor of something much sloppier and far less emotionally engaging.

It sucks to be so down on The Boy and the Beast, because I really liked the first half. Taken on its own, it’s a perfectly delightful fantasy coming-of-age tale laced with just enough whimsy, telling the story of a surrogate father and son who both find their missing hearts in each other’s company. And it’s good enough on its own that I’m still glad I say this film. But the second half is just a mess of unfinished ideas that pull us away from where we want to be and leave us with nothing satisfying in its absence. This movie could have been one of Hosoda’s better efforts; instead, it’s by far his weakest project yet.