Belle is not the first Mamoru Hosoda film I have seen, I recall liking The Girl Who Leapt Through Time a lot when I was younger, but I missed out on Summer Wars and his other acclaimed features. I’ve heard his virtual worlds grate against the sensibilities of some people, yet I am not among these detractors, as Belle took me back to my teenage years trying to navigate the online open steppe where barbarous trolls reigned supreme and my unfortunately named Asperger’s Anime Blog (Hans Asperger was a Nazi, I’l
Which brings me back to Belle , which is a retelling of Beauty and the Beast done in cyberspace. There’s no Angela Lansbury singing about tales as old as time, but the music in this film is top notch and drives the story forward with ballads of both joy and regret. Poor Suzu is a mousey schoolgirl whose mother sacrificed her life to save the child of a stranger when she was a kid, and she feels abandoned by her female parent through this fatal decision. Yet she gets hold of VR technology and becomes a new w
Suzu’s virtual concert is interrupted by both the Beast and the U version of Reddit moderators gate-crashing into her event where she would’ve sung on a CGI whale with speakers implanted in it, which provokes her curiosity as to who the Beast is. Like her, the Beast is an anonymous figure with both haters and defenders. Belle’s anonymity masks her deep anxiety rooted in the grief of losing her mother, whereas the Beast cloaks himself in the fugitive identity of a stranger to protect himself from the harshne