Ryuu to Sobakasu no Hime

Let me preface this review by saying that I love Mamoru Hosoda. I've seen the vast majority of his directorial output from the silver screen to the small screen. He directs with a deft hand, making the absolute most of any budget he's given. The episodes he's directed in TV anime, imbued with his distinct sensibilities, are the high water mark of any series they're a part of. But Belle is simply baffling. Belle makes for the third time Hosoda has revisited the concept of an virtual world. A fact that worried me before the film was even released because I don't believe Hosoda has any realgrasp of the internet. Oz, his previous depiction of a virtual space found in Summer Wars, felt like a fantasy setting rather than speculative fiction. But oh how I miss Oz when I compare it to Belle's world of U. Hosoda, and by extension the audience, has such a poor grasp of the inner workings and mechanics of U that any narrative he places within it crumbles. Belle is about a introverted girl named Suzu (the Japanese word for bell) who finds popularity as her online persona named Belle in the virtual world of U due to her amazing singing, something she is too afraid to do in the real world. Except not really because that plot line is speed through in a montage. The plot is actually a Beauty and the Beast story. Except for when it isn't, which is most of the time. The abruptness of these plot points and their on again off again nature is fast enough to make anyone's head spin. Hosoda's films have not been the same since he and his long time script writer Satoko Okudera parted ways. Okudera worked on what I consider Hosoda's best films, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Wolf Children. Even Summer Wars (my least favourite Hosoda film until Belle) is a perfectly pleasant watch, thanks in part to her no doubt. Hosoda has been the sole script writer on his films since Boy and the Beast. And while that was still a standout effort, it marked a shift in the writing style of his works. Hosoda has felt unfiltered ever since, adding anything and everything to his works. His scripts becoming increasingly bloated and convoluted. Even Hosoda's directing gets muddled in Belle, with half the film being in CGI to portray the virtual world of U. These portions of the movie were outsourced to Cartoon Saloon, best known for their gorgeous hand drawn films about Irish folklore. So it's odd to see them commissioned to work on CGI. That's not to say they did a bad job though. The CG animation is expressive but most of the character designs are overblown and the world they inhabit feels paper thin. Nothing about the virtual world of U makes any sense and most prominent glimpse into this world we ever get is a sea of avatars placed in a large void with indistinct buildings in the far off distance. This sever lack of world building leaves me wondering how U works on even a fundamental level. Placing any story in this setting invites confusion at every turn, creating an incoherent mess with logic gaps everywhere. There are still tender, well executed moments found in Belle but they're few and far between, found almost exclusively in its hand drawn segments. Honestly, if the film focused on Suzu finding confidence as her online persona which in turn gave her the courage to mend the fractured relationships in her life, that would've been enough. Instead, Belle is less than the sum its parts and stumbles at every opportunity. The competing plot lines battle for screen time, leaving the narrative under-baked. The CG world of U doesn't leave room for Hosoda to stretch his usual directorial muscles. The cast is overloaded, forcing characters, their development and relationships to be sidelined. In the end, Belle has too many ideas and lacks the ability to implement them into a cohesive whole.

As a big Mamoru Hosoda fan, his new movie "Belle" signified a return to what, in my opinion, had always been the director's strongest suit. After Wolf Children's depiction of a single mother's struggles, Bakemono no Ko's story about raising a kid on a magical world and Mirai no Mirai's four-year-old protagonist's tale, Hosoda was back at directing stories about high schoolers and high school life by extension. Belle's protagonist Suzu is a depressed 17-year-old girl that ends up hitting it huge as a mysterious singer on a virtual reality life simulator called "U". I don't want to delve too much into this, but I feelit might be necessary to as it does account for a huge portion of Belle's screentime. The digital hub people connect to in the movie feels very much like an afterthought. It's way too lifeless and generic, specially for a Hosoda movie. All we ever see users do while in "U" is fly through this city full of buildings and watch concerts. There's no reason 5 billion people around the world thought they couldn't miss out on this much fun. It also doesn't help that it's basically all done in CG (Crowds look Gross). At one point it even becomes difficult to understand how "U" can be accessed. Characters can be seen interacting with people in real life, then logged into "U", back and forth, it's crazy. The other half of "Belle" is composed of the kind of slice-of-life magic patented by Hosoda. It's interesting and has some really fun cuts. I do wish it could have back some of the huge amount of time allocated to the Dragon's subplot inside "U" to develop the characters better. And that's not the only way in which the existence of the "U" harmed "Belle" as a movie. One of the merits of "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time", pointed out by reviewers at the time was how it "instead of dealing with vast movements of history", chose to "concentrate in the small movements in the emotional lives of its Japanese urban high school protagonists over several days.". In Belle however, we at times have the opposite. Suzu's alter-ego becomes an ultra pop-star and the whole internet stops to check out what she's doing. Talk about egocentrism. If you were to tell me, back in 2007, that this is what a Mamoru Hosoda feature would look like in the 2020's, I would have asked: "Who the hell's Mamoru Hosoda?". But if you were to tell that to the community instead, I honestly don't think "Belle" is what they would expect. It doesn't feel like the work of the idiosyncratic director, who prioritized believable characters and making everyday life look fun above anything else. His new movie is a modern Japanese retelling of a Disney princess' story, and it ends up being similar to a Disney movie in many ways. I still enjoyed watching it and, despite the many plot contrivances, it doesn't stop being a heartfelt and fulfilling movie that stays true to something Hosoda has always advocated for throughout his career. "What I really want to capture are the moments that cause people to change, and also why people evolve into someone that differs from who they used to be. Those thoughts are always in my mind when I work." So go watch it!

Mamoru Hosoda can't write. The Boy and the Beast, Mirai and now Belle lack a significant amount of charm compared to his older works. The thing these feature films all have in common is they're the only ones written by Hosoda himself. Belle, in particular, showcases Hosoda's immensely bad habits as a writer more clearly than any of its predecessors. The story of Belle is heavily inspired by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont's 1756 version of 'Beauty and the Beast' with even the main characters sharing the same pseudonym. However compared to Disney's animated adaptation of the same tale, this feels like a jarring attempt to reinventthe wheel, devoid of any of the original's charm. Beauty and the Beast is a story that does have interesting themes; while it isn't subtle about them in the slightest and they're not particularly profound by today's standards they certainly do exist. However, the premise of finding empathy and love with another, even when your appearance is unsightly, loses a large amount of its emotional impact when the appearance is a virtual avatar CHOSEN by the player. Especially when the "beast" is revealed to, in fact, be some anime-haired righteous cool-guy in the real world. It astounds me that, 266 years after its publication, Hosoda has managed to somehow retell this story with less depth and complexity than the original. The writing itself feels incredibly cliché and, quite often, contrived. I found myself on an embarassing number of occasions being able to predict the outcome of a scene before it had transpired. The twists, turns and poor attempts at dialogue feel drearily similar to fictional writings I wrote for school assessments as a child. There's one scene in particular where the main character is on a train that felt ripped from an adolescent fan-fiction blog. Studio Chizu, the studio that has been in charge of every Hosoda film since Wolf Children, feel incredibly out of their depth here trying to bring the three-dimensional world of 'U' to life. The 3D visuals felt very sub-par; something that I may not have felt five years ago when there were no stellar examples of 3D animation within the anime industry. Studio Orange have since brought us Houseki no Kuni & Beastars, both of which look stunning compared to Belle despite it being a high-budgeted feature film. The backgrounds feel like the same asset copy and pasted dozens of times until some blocky mega-structure comes together and every asset, aside from the main two character models, feel utterly forgettable. Not only did it feel incredibly dated, certain scenes felt downright offensive; such as the worst-looking CGI fire I can recall in the last decade. The scenes that take place in the real-world look fine. Not incredible, by any means, but certainly not bad. However, it's hard to be kind to the film's style as a whole when Chizu's usual animation style is only used for 50% of runtime. You'll notice I did not give this film a 1/10, this means it clearly had some saving graces I enjoyed. For a start, the sound is quite nice. Again, not incredible (though I admit this can be subjective), but certainly enjoyable. Being a movie about singing, it had some nice original songs that were a delight to listen to; although I absolutely despised the method in which it was used to explore the motif of overcoming trauma. There are also certain scenes that I found quite charming. The confession scene between two side characters was superbly directed and had me genuinely laughing out loud in the cinema. While the confession itself had zero emotional weight, largely due to every side character having the depth of a puddle, the way it was presented was whole-heartedly charming. In conclusion, I hope Hosoda goes back to hiring more talented writers than himself to work on his projects. My favourite work of his, to this day, is the One Piece film Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island released in 2005. It feels like he's only become less creatively inspired as he's grown older and turned into a complete hack. A sad comparison compared to someone like Hayao Miyazaki who continues to impress me, with The Wind Rises being one of my favourite works of his to date. Belle lacks any form of subtlety in its storytelling, any originality in its writing, any masterful creativity in its visuals and any depth to its characters, with only a few subjective saving-graces to save its score from a 1/10. This is actually my first MAL review, I'd like to write more and hopefully get better at making them more succinct. So if you've read this far, thank you.

Spoiler free review. TL;DR Would I recommend Belle?: yes. This one is a weird one to review and I'm shocked at how polarizing the reviews are for what I'd call a decent film. STORY 4/10: The story, to be honest, is rough. There are a lot of interesting ideas, but they are poorly put together, and some decisions are just baffling with several plotholes. The very obvious Beauty and the Beast parallel seems kind of ham fisted, and is subverted kind of pointlessly. The denouement is also much shorter than it should have been and leaves a bunch of things unresolved. There's alsosome random shounen b.s. for some reason. That being said, the story definitely has some things to say, with most of it getting across more or less successfully. ART 8/10: The art is pretty good. It's definitely an interesting blend of 2d and 3d animation. The 2d animation is quite good, though probably not as good and definitely not as consistent as Hosoda's other films. The 3d animation is also quite good with Jin Kim giving Belle a very Disney look, and people like Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart contributing to the design of the world. There's a common issue of 3d in anime looking uncanny, but it works well here. SOUND 10/10: Definitely the strongest point of the movie. The soundtrack is incredible, and sets the tone for the film. This film is almost a musical due to characters singing being a major plot point of the movie, but there are just a few too many songs to really call it a musical. It could have been a more successful if they leaned into that a little more. Both the English and Japanese voice cast are also pretty comparable. I would probably recommend those who aren't fluent in Japanese watched it dubbed, as there is a lot of layered audio, and it can be difficult to read subtitles for several different things at once. CHARACTER 7/10: The characters are alright. I think there are probably too many characters, so the characters in it aren't able to be developed as deeply, with Ryuu being particularly underdeveloped. Suzu in the beginning is not particularly likable, though definitely develops, though maybe a little too fast, and incomplete due to the brevity of the denouement. Also, Hiroka is simply not a great person. She develops and becomes better, but doesn't develop enough to become likable. ENJOYMENT 8/10: Despite all its problems, Belle is definitely paced quite well and it's sound and visuals come together to create quite an experience that keeps you on your toes and not quite sure what will come next. It also has an excellent example of the awkwardness of highschool romance, which is easily the funniest part of the film. OVERALL 8/10: As I said in the intro, I would recommend Belle, just have tempered expectations. Also, a sidenote is it gets pretty dark later in the film. The thing that prompted me to write this review is seeing some of the incredibly low reviews I saw here, which I thought was unwarranted. It's a decent film, superficially very reminiscent of Summer Wars, while also being one of Hosoda's weaker works.

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