The most beautiful YA film ever? “Belle”

Mamoru Hosoda’s “Belle” is many things, but most of all, it is simply the most opulent Young Adult/coming of age tale ever. I don’t mean to infer that the visuals distract from the story, at all. If anything, every frame is at the service of a narrative jam-packed with sub-plots and ideas. And for the most part, these are handled with care. The film only seems a little overstuffed now and again but I have no idea how anyone would decide what to prune, what to discard.

Hosoda may be best known for 2018’s Oscar(TM) for best animated feature “Mirai” or perhaps for “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time” (2006). But he’s been around since 1999, to go by IMDb with his short “Digimon” which was eventually expanded to a feature length film. In any case, Hosoda’s work is characterized with an astute visual sensibility that supports stories suffused with empathy and finding a place in the world. 

In his latest, he locates the Beauty and the Beast fable as a thematic pivot point in the life of a young girl coming to terms with the death of her mother and the grief that led her to withdraw so deeply into herself. Suzu and her friend Hiro find themselves invited to join “U”, a vast (five billion subscribers/participants!) online community where one’s avatar is created out of biometric readings, replicating the enduser’s best qualities (or so it says). Consequently, Suzu’s avatar is a beautiful auburn haired songstress (think of a cosmic Taylor Swift crossed with Beyonce.) 

After Suzu’s mother died saving attempting to save a child from drowning, she retreated from everything, including music, the medium in which she excelled and found greatest expression. Upon arriving in U as Belle, she breaks into song and rises out from/above the crown as a major figure. So far, so good. Suzu gets some validation and in an interesting turn, instead of accepting money for herself, the funds go to charities. Hosoda and his team are setting up Suzu for sainthood, but it’s better than that. She’s damaged, we get that, but the way Suzu navigates high school life, where she’s very much under the radar, and her online world, where she’s often the center of attention, is well-rendered. 

The internet has rarely been used so well in a film. Hosoda’s script is written with a sure hand and shrewd awareness of the shades and nuances of online discussion and debate. He captures the toxicity as well as the healthier aspects of the virtual world that occupies so much of our three-dimensional spacetime. 

For example, Belle isn’t completely heralded; she has detractors aplenty but remains a touchstone for most of the U community. Her detractors are, of course, snarky trolls and we get to hear them in voiceover and read them as the comments blow up on the movie screen or on Belle’s phone. 

It would be counterproductive to a) not discuss the visuals and b) not show off a small gallery (scroll to the end of the post to check some out.) 

Hosoda and his cinematographers (I saw a credit for three but not on IMDb) render “our world” with extreme care and attention to detail. The change of weather, the water rippling, and shifts in light are equivalent to animated plein aire painting. As complement or contrast, U is an awesome phantasm of pop art, swirling compositions, and bursts of visual depth so astonishing that the eye is tricked into thinking you’re watching a 3-D movie. 

The camera moves fluidly from scene to scene but not so much to leave the viewer overwhelmed or exhausted. There is simply no wasted movement nor gratuitous lingering over details so lovingly drawn. If the film deals with loss, grief, and adolescent confusion, it does so with a visually resplendent vocabulary like I haven’t seen in a long time. Think of a fusion between Shinkai’s “Your Name” and, I don’t know, “Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse”? Each shift in graphic style flows from the story beat at hand. We go from quiet, pastoral walks along a river in our world to superhero anime tropes during fight sequences that wouldn’t be out of place in the Evangelion series, to some of the richest imagery this side of Disney’s animated version of “Beauty and the Beast” and it is to this film that Hosoda pays explicit homage, even replicating and possibly surpassing the grand ballroom dance sequence in the earlier cartoon.

At one point in U, as Belle is about to perform a kind of comeback concert (Suzu does have a life, we know…), a dark figure appears from outside the sphere in which she is about to sing, brawling with various and sundry gendarmes. This is “The Dragon” also referred to, later, as “The Beast”. Dude’s pissed. The comments blow up, telling his back-story, about how he started out in one of the martial arts communities and how his presence grew increasingly unwelcome as he would bully his way into other communities just to cause harm and tear them apart. 

His back is a cloak of multicolored “bruises” and after he’s vanished and the scene closes, Belle/Suzu is both repulsed and senses something else is going on. Without going into the machinations, suffice it to say that Belle tracks The Beast to his castle, is rebuffed several times and eventually wins his confidence, apparently, since he protects her from attack by the Guardians of U (I don’t know what else to call them; the big guy is an admin - I suppose - who is able to dox people, represented as a buff golden superhero-y avatar). Later, when word reaches Suzu that The Beast is in trouble (Justian and his cohort have found his castle and lit it on fire), she flies to him as Belle and it’s afterward that we discover that The Beast isn’t anyone that Suzu and Hiro thought he was. 

During all this, Suzu has been coming out of her shell little by little. As opposed to some grand flowering, Hosoda plays his character development quietly and subtly. Suzu still grapples with low self-esteem, rebuffs her childhood friend Shinobu, has difficulty performing with a choral group of women (in a really sly scene, both Suzu and the women all grapple with what exactly happiness is and it’s both a riot and thought-provoking), and eventually assists the popular girls in school with meeting her crush. Like I said, there are a lot of sub-plots in this film, but they’re far more deftly handled than I’m getting across, for sure.

The women in the group all knew who Belle was and didn’t let Suzu knew they knew; heck, Ruka, the popular girl knew! So it’s not a big surprise when they show up in the elementary school where Hiro has commandeered a room to track down The Beast. Suzu said that his eyes looked like a child’s and they’re able to find two brothers, one who early in the film had said online that he saw The Beast as a hero, and the other who protects him from their father’s abuse captured online when Suzu and Hiro attempt to find them. It’s a gutting sequence and we sense the urgency of what is unfolding and an uncertainty of where things are going to end up. Just because a well-known tale is the centerpiece of or a major plot point doesn’t mean it’s going to end the same way. 

As it is, Suzu is able to locate the boys and protect them from their father. It’s a crazy inspiring scene. I mean by that a very inspiring scene. There’s no big beating, but how she stares their dad down is so utterly moving. Frankly, it’s only one of several sequences throughout that are similarly moving. 

If I have any dings about the flick, they are minor. Hiro starts out very much as a Daria-esque character; worldly, no-bullshit, to the point of cynical with an equally dry delivery to that MTV stalwart of another era. But as the film goes on, she becomes more strident, her delivery that panicky shrillness that characterize many of the comic relief figures in anime. I also feel as thought the relationship with her father received short shrift. Yes, yes, since her mother died and Suzu withdrew more and more, her father recedes as a figure in her life, but even if that’s the point, there’s not enough of him in view to determine if they were ever close or why didn’t he attempt to penetrate her shell more out of concern for her mental health, if nothing else. Basically, her dad is more of a signifier than a meaningful plot point. That sounds bad, but again, because there is so much else at play throughout the film, it winds up more of a quibble.

It’s not a perfect film, but it’s awfully close and I may have to see it again with sub-titles. The voice acting on the dubbed version was exceptional (the biggest name and the only one I recognized was Manny Jacinto as Shinobu; oddly, he’s not credited in the IMDB entry), but I wonder if what read as stridence, say, from Hiro, might read differently, in its native Japanese (and for that matter, would the translation be different: pro tip, kids - watch a dubbed anime and then watch it subtitled…this is instructional!)

In recent days, I’ve been reading and hearing a number of people weigh in on the future of the theater-going experience and I am of the mind that it will be the big tent-pole features, MCU and DCEU movies, and actioners that will get butts in seats to the winnowing out of mid-ranged human scale dramas. 

Recently, Ben Affleck noted that “The Last Duel” failed at the box office but was doing extremely well on streaming platforms. I agree with him that this may be more than likely the way things will go: it’s not that there isn’t an audience for a film like “The Last Duel” but that it’s an audience that may not feel a need to see it on the big screen. Affleck pointed to the sterling work being done on streaming like “Succession”, “Mare of Easttown”, and others and that people may be more likely to prefer the intimacy of home viewing for dramas like these, including standalone feature films. 

I would, however, hope that films like “Belle” continue to be released on the big screen for their visual opulence alone. The bonus is when you’re met with heartfelt tales and narrative ideas that continue to inform and inspire when you leave the theater.

The Gallery:

As ever, remember to click on the image to see it full scale. 

Images are also copyright of the holder, which should go without saying.