At the Museum of the Moving Image, I enjoyed watching the 2021 anime film Belle, directed by Mamoru Hosada. It was a gorgeous film that looked beautiful on the big screen, using a lot of CGI technology to give the film a larger, 3-D look, as a lot of the film takes place in an online virtual community where people use avatars to either hide behind or enhance their hidden strengths.
The film centers on a shy schoolgirl named Suzu, who deals with a lot of anxiety and social awkwardness, and feeling distant from her father ever since her mother died trying to save a drowning child, and getting Internet hate for it. She loves music, but has withdrawn from it since it was her mother who taught her how to sing and create music. Suzu is introduced to the virtual community of U by her techie friend Hiro, and Hiro creates a pop star avatar for Suzu, highlighting her talented singing voice behind a flowing pink-haired Disney princess-looking star named Belle, who quickly blows up in popularity on the app, with contentious debate from fans and haters alike. As Hiro points out, talented favorites usually have small cult communities of fandom, while bigger stars have more mixed reaction and controversy.
The movie expands more to not just be about a shy girl learning to express herself, but is a funny reflection of Internet comments and videos fighting each other on fan theories on Belle’s true identity, as well as the identity of “the Dragon,” a beast who eliminated avatars in martial arts battles and crashes into other virtual worlds, and comes off as an angry bruised beast, being hunted by Thundercats-looking superheroes, but Belle is drawn to him and his pain. Then the film starts a recreation of Beauty and the Beast in the app, lifting influences from the Disney version and the Cocteau version, and it blends together well with the mix of fantasy as a shield for people’s realities, and gets more absorbing to watch.
Some of the funniest moments in the film were simply teens in the real world having crushes on each other and being terrified to talk to one another. The animators would have just a frozen still of a character with a gaping mouth or hiding their face while beet-red, and just hold on that image for a few seconds like time froze for them, and it was absolutely hilarious, especially if they stay frozen while others are reacting.
Another great moment was when Suzu is trying to reverse a rumor going around (“He held her hand - it’s going viral!”) by texting the more reasonable and influential girls in the class to set things straight, and flipping her peers like they are virtual coins.
I’m not a big anime fan, and am out of the loop of most anime series, but I do see one-off movies like this sometimes, and really adore them. This was a really beautiful, funny, and thoughtful film to watch, I’m happy I saw it.
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