REVIEW: Belle

Anyone who's ever tried to describe the appeal of a favorite piece of music, or better yet music as a whole, might be familiar with the circular experience of feeling the power of a given piece of art while also feeling helpless to describe why that piece is powerful. It's fitting that a movie with music at its center, like Mamoru Hosada's Belle, should follow this pattern.

The backdrop of this film is "U," an online Wonderland where users adopt an entirely new persona and interact with other users in a sort of fantasy-inspired platform. U is said to transform each user into their truest form. It's little wonder, then, that teenage Suzu, who lost her ability to sing after a childhood trauma, would find escape and relief in this paradise where she becomes "Belle," a virtual goddess with the voice of an angel. But a mysterious entity, whom others dub "The Beast," storms onto U, leaving chaos in his wake. To the population of The U, The Beast is an agent of evil, but Suzu senses in him a wounded heart, and finding the goodness in The Beast might be the very reason she adopted the Belle persona to begin with.

Even on the other side of this viewing, I can't articulate how all the pieces of this film come together--it's a fairy-tale set in a giant video game exploring the overlaps between kindness and internet popularity through a series of music videos--or why they work, but whatever master equation Hosada used, I won't argue with the results.

The lure of physically entering the great big world of the internet isn't new to this film. But U isn't the frigid cyberspace coliseum of TRON. U, which is rendered in a style different from the offscreen world, is bright and fluid. The narrative demands of the film allow the art style to swim freely between zany and illustrious. Sometimes we're wading through swamps of Pokemon-like avatar designs, sometimes we're watching Belle and The Beast dancing across the stars. The creative team might have actually created the most gorgeous animation ever put to film. What a shame it is that most of the world won't get around to beholding such glorious vistas until the film's theatrical run has expired.

So captivating is this world that the viewer might be willing to gloss over some of the narrative shortcuts at work. The stakes, for example ... what are they? U hosts a group of informal police governing the system who subject transgressors and troublemakers with "unveiling," an unmasking that reveals the true identity behind a person's avatar. This is the worst thing that can happen to a user. Why that is, isn't entirely clear. It almost makes sense as a threat for Suzu/Belle, who harbors fear around the dreaded spotlight of public attention, but it's not established that a person's experience with the U is contingent on their identity being a secret. The malicious threat of "unveiling" is just something the viewer is expected to take for granted.

This stream-of-consciousness voice is equal parts frustrating and enthralling. You can never really predict where the story's going because the developments don't seem beholden to your standard rules of setup/payoff. It's as though the ideas of the storytellers are forming in real-time as the light pours out from the projector. It's perhaps for this reason that the first half of the film feels almost experimental in nature, like a college freshman who needs to major in everything for their first semester.

But Hosada and his team locked onto the mystery ingredient that endows their meandering with profundity. The place the film ultimately arrives is insightful less because of the rhetorical chain it builds across its runtime and more because of its ability to draw vulnerability from its audience, and to do so across many different backdrops. That's something not every film knows how to do, and here's where I must acknowledge my shortcomings as a film critic: I can't even articulate how this film manages to arrive at its destination while skipping so many steps, I remember being irritated with Pixar's Soul for trying to do just that. I only knew that in Belle's climactic performance, even if I couldn't explain in schematic terms why Belle had to sing, watching the scene unfold was one of the great pleasures of being a film lover. I don't know. Maybe all character arcs are just best completed with a musical number.

"Belle" is the rare film that truly begs to be understood, a film that entices the viewer with its contradictions. The film revels in the relatively new invention of the internet, but the portrait the film paints brings the viewer to a place that feels much more elemental.

--The Professor

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