wandercreature

It truly never gets any easier, the moment we see our creative beacons arrive only to feel underwhelmed by their biggest work to date. So when I put off catching Mamoru Hosoda’s latest in a theater during one of the most frightening spikes in the COVID era, it was with the feeling that I had indeed missed out on something, and that home viewing wouldn’t compare. But the truth is, it is possible that had I done so, there might have been a mild possibility that the spectacle of BELLE (aka..The Dragon and The Freckled Princess) would overpower what I could inevitably see as a wall of limitations. Which is to say that in spite of glowing word from trusted voices, and a stunning ad campaign complete with awards talk, the film tends to rely on the robustness of its production to obfuscate genuine issues that could have been rectified at the writing stage.

BELLE ostensibly attempts to be a director's culmination of every work that has come before, meaning his themes of personal transformation in an ever expanding online world complete with his love of Japanese high school heart tugging are on display. In this case, he spins the tale of Suzu, a quiet country teen who's innocuous nature save for a constellation of freckles on her face who is living a double life as a shy student, but is a beloved and beautiful virtual idol in the massive online community known as U. It is in the no-boundaries realm of U that Suzu's alter-ego has amassed millions of fans through her life's passion as a song writer and vocalist. And it is through this double life we are host to her estrangement from her father, whom she shares a countryside home in the years after tragedy takes mom away. At school, Suzu's life takes on its own litany of complications as her best friend serves as virtual manager for her online life, while her childhood pal continues to loom protectively over her as he has since they were both six. Other friends fill the equation with requisite longings and dreams seemingly ripped from hundreds of anime productions over the decades.

But it is within her latest and largest concert event that she is drawn to a lone dragon avatar seemingly causing chaos across U suddenly turning this confluence of elements into a major spin on a familiar fairy tale that BELLE ultimately establishes its identity.

On the production level the film is certainly a major affair on par with the largest anime works to date. Taking Hosoda's obsessions to levels never before expressed on such a grand canvas as singers explode in trails of color and expressiveness in contrast to the deceptively simple backdrops of daily small town life complete with his love of confessions in front of flowing bodies of water. Fans of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2007) will immediately be hit with a swath of deja vu. But within the realm of U lies Hosoda and team's grandest visual strokes as we are awash in shapes, colors, architecture, and plays on space that evoke the wearing of VR gear. It's a pretty wild final statement that the director has seemingly been heading toward for over twenty years.

There's also Suzu's very personal and lauded music which is meant to serve as something of an emotional backbone to the piece with songs that are effectively spectacular within a few scenes. A collaboration that includes the talents of Ludvig Forsell, Daiki Tsuneta, Miho Hazama, and composer Taisei Iwasaki, seeks to be the film’s larger lifeblood.

The ambition inherent in his works have been a constant since as far as I can remember. (The Digimon feature immediately comes to mind.) And the level of juggling required has been something Hosoda has been successful at before. Where BELLE runs into problems is in the execution of the impressive number of themes the film is attempting to link together. Whether it be about Suzu's double life, internet fame, love troubles, the long standing gulf between her and her father, or perhaps the film's most challenging aim, in encouraging empathy for randos online, it's clear that in spite of previous efforts, somehow these threads find themselves either insufficiently explored or poorly connected.

Issues that could have been rectified at the writing stage dog what on the surface feels like a dazzling creative statement from an artist who has been capable of delicately threading character and thematic material before. One possible culprit might be the absence of former screenwriting collaborator Satoko Okudera who's work made both Girl and Summer Wars sing with equal doses of grandeur and intimate character work. Being the only scribe with this ultra busy narrative must have proved exhausting. Another possibility is something I have been dreading for years as an lover of anime, the fear that generations beyond the Miyazakis and Takahatas of the world where the real world as well as cinematic language were the central north stars of a production, are now in the throes of replicating anime tropes instead. It’s something that has become something of a refrain as of late most evident before this in the form of one Hideaki Anno’s end to his Rebuild Of Evangelion series of films where lore and tropes take the place of organic storytelling. And while BELLE does make attempts to be more holistic in its narrative approach, it ultimately buckles to assumption and incomplete threads of information that would normally make the story as a whole gel.

Add to what Hosoda seems to want to say through his internet storyline, along with a truly challenging abuse aspect that requires a great deal more coverage, what we get is a series of disparate moments that must have seemed powerful on paper, but have a hard time landing in the execution. And one of the major casualties of this is garbled messaging. For my money films like BELLE and even Rebuild of Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0 represent a striking and possibly even troubling new culture within anime production that overflows with creative ambition, but cannot help but reveal deficiencies in having all the keys at one team’s disposal. And whatever does land, tends to be in the service of strangely regressive, toxic ideals. Without going into too much detail, there is another aspect that I have yet to mention regarding a cadre of self-described guardians within the realm of U, led by a blonde haired, blue eyed caricature of an American superhero obsessed with bringing down the Beast through what is known as “Unveiling”, which can be translated as doxxed. And because this is yet another spinning plate added to the film’s already busy palette, underexamined this path borders on less seeking empathy between internet and social media users, but of defending toxic trolls from a potentially “woke” mob out to quash them from existence. This is where Hosoda’s almost 1990s idealism of the internet collides with more complex, well understood realities of our daily lives online. It’s a misread that almost hobbles the film completely for me.

The muddled spectacle finds further evidence as the finale approaches in a sequence where Suzu finds herself in need of doing away with her online mask, becoming vulnerable for all to see in a sequence that is meant to be the larger emotional culmination of the film (One of two btw). And it is a truly stirring scene of music and animation that would work if again, the connections were made between all of Hosoda’s aims. As such, it’s a beautiful several minutes that feel strangely removed from the rest of the story, as if this were the ending to another film entirely.

While visually astonishing, BELLE can't decide what kind of work it wants to be, nor has the willingness to meet audiences halfway. Sure we could chock it up to a cultural difference when talking the internet, but for all its aims to keep character front and center, the thing never figures out how to make us care about its arguments. It's to the point that it feels like creators like Hosoda simply can't get around a world where accountability might be a consequence of being a problematic figure online.

And it also brings to mind why it's so important to thread through needle with vital character information early in the story in order to properly merge the human story with the thematic meat. Because on the surface, the elements are definitely in place in BELLE. The issue comes in when the film needs us to connect these vital components through recognition and behaviors. We've seen this in other films of this shape where protagonists empathize with a misunderstood quantity. The problem here is that in spite of Hosoda's larger intentions of "don't judge others as we don't know their truth", we never get a proper planting of the flip side of that equation. We never know Beast at the outset because it's pretty hard to do this without making his behavior look dismal at the beginning. While she sees him at her concert, we never fully get what she is seeing in him. There's no established connection, so all we get is something assumed rather than at least vaguely understood. For something making such references to classic stories, it feels like a crucial misstep to me. What this conveys to me sadly is that Hosoda either doesn't really know how to give the audience more information about this empathic connection, or he's simply indirectly railing against what he views as "woke mob" behavior, which is its own can of worms. Either way, I don't think it's an easy challenge with so many of us witness to online behavior over the course of 25-plus years. You can't just dazzle us and call it a day.

And we've seen that Hosoda loves using virtual worlds as backdrop since the very beginning of his career. It's just interesting that it really overshadows everything else to the point that I never grok any real point to any of it. Not to mention a feeling that we're also witnessing a near complete jump into digital animation which is kind of a bummer to me as what I loved about his work initially was the unmistakably hand drawn nature of it. I understand that near total CG animation was applied to the bulk of the scenes in U, but the effect of it for me is distancing as it contrasts relatively harshly in contrast to the scenes in the real world. Of which include some sterling moments of expressively animated comedy and warmth that evoke the best of The Girl and Summer Wars not unlike a victory lap for the fans, but also a reminder of those few lives that Suzu has and is affecting in the real. By wedging in this wild twist on Beauty and the Beast, the whole becomes almost too unwieldy to hold together. Other great casualties of this attempt include the wrap around regarding our heroine and her relationship with her father which has one really affecting moment, but is all too brief considering the event that pulled them apart.

The flip side for me with all of this is that ambition can itself be lauded, even when the whole doesn’t work. There are many ideas and human touches to BELLE that do ask for more from these types of productions, and in a way they to provoke valuable conversations about the nature of story, and what it takes to bring new and challenging questions to light. And while I do find this to be another lesser Hosoda entry, it has been a gift to see this artist and many others shoot for so much in the decades since the medium reached maturity with feature length narratives. And sometimes it’s only because we admire creatives so much that we can’t help but clock when reach exceeds grasp.