I’m fascinated by Belle.
I was predisposed to like it, having enjoyed other films by Mamoru Hosoda, and sat through Belle jointly in awe and despair at what it was doing. It is relentlessly frenetic, telling a dual tale of online and offline lives that tries to encompass celebrity culture, privacy, anonymity, grief, depression, self-realisation, policing, child abuse and teenage romance. That list alone should tell you that Belle is highly ambitious and aiming for a broad emotional and intellectual range. Sadly, not only does it fail to hit the notes it wants to, but most are dissonant with each other.
I should jump in here with some positives: I like, for the most part, how the story is visualised. There’s a strong aesthetic identity to both digital and analogue worlds.
The online world of U is primarily cel-shaded 3D CGI that is more intensely colourful and graphic than the offline world, but sympathetic to it in terms of character design and by limiting its frame rate. The low(ish) frame rate along with the sense of fluidity that would otherwise be offered by the digital animation offers a feeling of hyper-reality that works perfectly for how this digital space is pitched in the story. The digital world can make use of free-roaming cameras and extreme virtual lenses to offer both a freer and less real sense of space than in the analogue world.
The offline space is in a traditional animated style, 2D hand-drawn animation with flat colour and near photo-realistic painted backgrounds. It embraces the restriction of a locked-off (virtual) camera that simplifies this technique and stands in contrast to the more effusive, flowing, digital world. Offline, of course, palettes are more restricted.
Both worlds, frankly, contain a lot of beauty and expression. Events in the digital world (and I’m on the verge of veering into the negative again here) quote or evoke an awful lot of other sources; Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, the fantasy spaces of Terry Gilliam, The Matrix, Tron, Jan Pieńkowski. I found this surprising and enjoyed how it added impact and detail to its visual schemes.
What I didn't enjoy was how the film tries to address the volume and weight of all the elements it introduces.
Let's start with the basis: the central thread of the story is teenager Suzu coming to terms with grief at the death of her mother and the trauma of the circumstances of her death. She achieves some escape when, in the depths of her depression, she enters the digital world of U and becomes her avatar, Belle. Suzu shared music with her mother and since her death has been unable to sing. As Belle, however, she can sing once more and this self-expression begins to have a healing effect on her. Through to this point, I was with the film, although I had reservations about the way it was delivering its information. Unfortunately the disjointed delivery of narrative continues and I quickly lost faith in the integrity and reliability of what I was being shown: Belle's an overnight celebrity? Suzu's friend Hiro already knows she's Belle; I didn't assume she'd told anyone? How much time has passed?
The film already has a conceptual implausibility (more on this to follow) and the inconsistency of narrative delivery only served to create a fractal effect for me in further undermining what it was trying to achieve. Belle continues to drop things in and out at such a rapid rate (there is a lot of information to parse) that important bits of set-up don't have the significance to support their much more laboured pay-off later on.
I'd cite here the film's stylised presentation of internet communication, which appears intercut with the analogue world and intermingles with the world of U, to confusing effect. For example, there is a real-world teen gossip crisis for Suzu to deal with, which is taking place via group chat, but it's visualised for the audience as a hex-grid war game, which takes away the practical and emotional reality of that experience.
I believe the film-makers are trying to get across the complexity and breadth of digital communication in a simple cinematic shorthand, which theoretically I agree with, but I'm not convinced they landed on a good shorthand. The end result tends toward oversimplification and hyperbole that is reductive of the human causes/effects of these interactions. For example, the sequence where Belle is canonised as a celebrity is considerably naff:
The film is aiming to conjure up a culture of instant communication that comes over as caricature (there are lots of audio and visual soundbites.) Caricaturing for the sake of brevity extends so far throughout the structure of the film that most of the characters remain, at best, archetypes. Only Suzu and Kei (the Beast) break out into some meaningful dimensionality by the end. To give the film credit, it gives Suzu an emotional journey that tracks within its own context and pays off in ways that make sense for what has been established, but for me, it remains superficial.
This has to do with the lack of credibility in the world. The world of U and, by extension, the wider human world, is not well defined. Technologically, we seem to be in the near future and U is something like the projected Metaverse. Bizarrely, you don’t get to choose your avatar in this virtual world, which comes across as something like an MMO interface for… social media? Apparently, the app analyses a photo of you and tells you what you should look like. It then uses biometric data to bring out your inner strengths (???) and secure your login, so a person can have only one avatar. These features are not further explicated or explored and, frankly, don't make a lot of sense to me.
Once in, what are the boundaries or restrictions of this world? Who can program it? Events and structures must come from somewhere and users have formed vigilante groups without any obvious oversight or limitation. There are a couple of vague allusions to sponsorship and monetisation but these are very quickly waved aside.
I don't get a sense of what type of culture or economy this digital behemoth exists within, other than supplying my own impressions from life. I'm not sure what state this fictional real world is in - no-one seems particularly willing to respond to the evidenced emotional and physical abuse of children, apart from Suzu taking her own kind of vigilante action, supported (only to a certain point, bizarrely) by the significant people in her life.
This climactic confrontation sequence is not badly directed but it is commitedly melodramatic, a fact which both abrades the other tones of the film and, again, reduces its subject matter to caricature, to a diagram even. I'm baffled by its conclusion. It doesn't feel like this is a "real" world conclusion but a dramatic one, and I can't see why it need be so unrealistic even after it makes its (stylised) big character statement.
On that, there is a crucial character moment for Suzu here as she stares someone down. This is the only point at which I felt the animation, which otherwise is uniformly great, wasn't up to the job of acting the scene. For the stare, Suzu is given the no-animation treatment (I don't think the light in her eyes even squiggles); we read the dramatic effect only in the intensity of the other party's reaction. In a live action performance, you would feel the energy coming off the performer. Animation can do this, but it isn't doing it here, which is a great pity. Remember folks, more is less when it comes to 'toons!
While the film is trying to wrestle with the complex interconnections of dual realities and the very real ramifications of grief and child abuse, it's also trying to layer on the allegorical trappings of Beauty and the Beast. It's far too much for me. This element is beautifully visualised, but it creates another point of disjuncture to ask an emotional investment in allegorical ciphers when the stakes are already obfuscated by an ill-defined fantasy world. The narrative lifting these portions are trying to do is already undermined.
And what is the point of the film so deliberately quoting Disney's Beauty and the Beast if it's not a reference the characters themselves are making? We have no evidence that they've been able to shape their appearance or surroundings. If it's the film saying "remember Beauty and the Beast?", the answer's "yes", and that's another superficiality.
Oddly, the film or, at least, Suzu's character journey, is supposed to hinge on her songs. These fell very flat for me, as earnest but banal modern pop. I didn't get any of the soaring catharsis that they're supposed to evoke within the story. I felt they were further undermined by more naff visual shorthand, particularly the moment when all the audience's hearts light up like they're waving lighters.
In summary, this is a film about the internet which has tried to pull off more than it can accomplish. I think the internet itself is too large a subject - you try to make a story about the internet and you end up trying to make a story about the world, which is nigh on impossible. Visualising digital spaces is incredibly tricky and can often come off, as I think it does here, as oversimplified and reductive. It's a particularly difficult task to capture the interaction of both the real and digital worlds and weight them accordingly, to perception and to practical cause and consequence. Ralph Breaks the Internet, a unique example as far as I'm aware, gets around this problem by only dealing with the virtual side of reality, at an abstraction. Belle doesn't afford itself this luxury. To its credit though, I think it doesn't fall into the trap of unintentionally exploiting its subject matter or moralising over it; it's more open than that. I think it's not unreasonable to draw comparisons with Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue and Paprika, both of which deal with similar ideas in a more cogent fashion. I'd need to revisit Hosoda's previous film on teens in a digital alternative world, Summer Wars, for some perspective on that.
I rate this film: Disappointing/They clearly put a lot of work and love into this
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