Being a film critic is certainly one of the more savory stations in life, but it's not without its frustrations.
We are, after all, expected to craft a perfectly sound summation of a film's merits and limitations after just a single viewing of a film--and always immediately after that single viewing. This is not the ideal condition in which a discerning mind fairly or accurately appraises the worth of a text. Art demands reflection. Reflection takes time. You catch subtle inflections upon repeat viewings that completely change your context for said film. And yet, film reviews depend on visceral first responses, and so we critics offer up our unseasoned reactions, praying that the casualties will be minimal ...
I'm here to write about one such experience I've had with this phenomenon: my review of Mamoru Hosoda's Belle, premiering in U.S. markets in January of 2022.
Anyone who actually read that review might be confused by the penitence I'm now expressing. After all, I did give the film the thumbs up, calling it possibly the most beautifully animated film to date.
But in this review, I also questioned whether the film truly earned the intense emotional reaction I was getting. After all, I'm a fan of the director's work, and this was my first opportunity to see one of his films on the big screen. Could I honestly say that this didn't affect my response? I left the film enraptured, but somehow not trusting my own reaction.
And yet the film stayed with me in a way that even I had not anticipated. A few months later I rented it on YouTube only to discover about a week later that it had been added to HBO Max's library. I felt punished for my impatience, but it ended up being a non-issue because I found I was content to just watch it again. And again. And again. It was through these endless, needless rewatches that I found the connections I thought the film had overlooked on that first viewing. I found setup, development, and payoff, and it all flowed naturally with the protagonist’s arc. And eventually I had to concede that Belle was by every measure I could think of a masterwork.I was driven to write this essay after I received a reply to one of my YouTube comments about this very film. I made an observation about this film missing out on an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature for that year, and about a year after the fact, someone gave this reply:
I was of two minds reading this response. Part of me totally understood where this viewer was coming from because I had some of the same reactions watching it the first time. The other part of me was really mad that they refused to see past the surface level criticisms of such a transcendent film.
But with this essay I’m not trying to shut down the author of this YouTube comment or the thousands of others like them--I can't just expect every potential viewer to have the same experience I did. I see this more as a space for me to celebrate my experience with the film, to follow through on some of the insights that maybe I wasn’t ready to perceive on that first fateful viewing, and maybe tie that in to some general thoughts about that which film does better than any other medium: visual storytelling.
Intro to Belle and Mamoru Hosoda
But
not everyone finds love online. Suzu encounters an angry avatar, dubbed “The
Beast,” who sows chaos everywhere he goes. The internet finds him a nuisance,
but Suzu senses in him a wounded heart, someone hurting on the other side of
the computer. If only she could find who he is offline, maybe she could help
him. But the online law enforcement wants to find The Beast too, and they’ll
threaten to unveil “Belle” to all of U if they think it will help them to find
him first. Suzu will have to put everything on the line if she’s going to save
The Beast.

And Hosada has been inching
closer to the mainstream, if not nearly as quickly as he deserves. He received
a long overdue Oscar nomination for Mirai in 2019. (Seeing the animation
of Belle, especially the rendering of U, I can’t help but wonder if
scoring the Oscar nomination for Mirai encouraged the studio to give him
a longer leash and a bigger toolbox to tell his next story.)
Belle represents the culmination of several prominent motifs across his films. The “Beauty and the Beast'' story, for example, features in much of his work, as Hosoda himself has acknowledged. Wolf Children deals with a woman raising her children from her werewolf lover, The Boy and the Beast refits the fairy-tale to work as a father-son story with a lot more sword-fighting, and Belle transposes the story onto a giant video game, itself another one of Hosoda’s favorite tools. We’ve seen Hosoda play in this sandbox before with Summer Wars, a film which also features a sort of internet-based fantasy world. What makes this film’s take on social media so different is the way it explores how the internet can vacillate between a place of endless possibility but also a sort of emotional arena. In Hosoda’s words:
"I think we have this tool in social media where we can connect with the online world, and it looks very positive, like on TikTok everyone is always so happy, but I think a lot of young people feel like it leads to feelings of loneliness, and low self-esteem, and I wonder how they will manage when they’re faced with the possibility of being trolled the second they post something online. That’s what I wanted to explore in Belle, and also about the context of my own five-year old daughter and how she will cope in the future.”
All
of the professional reviews that I have read seemed game for Hosoda’s vision,
but they always manage to concede that the film’s plot lags a little behind the visuals.
In almost every instance, the takeaway seems to be that there are just too many
story elements for one film. For example, Joe Mortenson of Wall Street
Journal writes, “There’s too much plot for the film to manage,
but its heart, and sumptuous art, are so firmly in the right place that its
appeal comes through sweet and clear.”
When
there’s such a consensus on what a film’s shortcomings are, it’s hard to just
write it off as a critical oversight. Again, this is an observation that I myself expressed in that initial review. But as I've gone back to the film multiple times (itself worth noting), I've come to personally appreciate that this appraisal doesn't do justice to the film. There’s a lot that is lost when you put story and spectacle
in competition with one another instead of letting them enrich one another.
I’ve observed that when a viewer decides to graduate from that of a passive consumer to an active consumer, one of the first islands they land on tends to be the observation that "it's not enough to have good special effects, a film needs a good story." And it is true that a poorly developed story can be partially obscured by visual spectacle.
The problem is a lot of consumers become so pleased with themselves for finding that specific observation that they hang up their shovel and refuse to further engage with the complexities of film analysis. They’re content to just turn their nose at all things mainstream and call it enlightenment. This conversation has taken up special real estate in this era of CGI blockbusters, but in reality, great filmmakers have been striving after visual magnificence ever since we discovered you could make pictures move on a screen. The best filmmakers know how to play the rules of visual storytelling to tell the best story, and they always have.
Take something like The Sound of Music. The film’s title number is preceded by several aerial shots of the open mountain land. There’s a full two minutes of build-up, the first minute of which doesn’t even include musical score. The film spends a lot of time imparting visual spectacle, and this isn't time squandered. The image itself is beautiful to look at, yes, but it also carries thematic utility.
The film is invoking the majesty of the alps to convey something about the story, that it is about something larger than life. This is all before Maria comes in and tells us that this is a story about the everlasting power of music--which invites a comparison between the two things. It suggests that music is not only as beautiful as the mountains, but it is also as timeless as nature itself. Something far more enduring than the darkness that Maria and the Von Trapps are about to face with the rise of Naziism in Europe. That’s visual storytelling.
I think in the wake of Avatar: The Way of Water being well-received, audiences are starting to acknowledge that perhaps it doesn’t speak to some creative deficit for a film to impart its meaning primarily through visual spectacle. Seeing Jake and Neytiri’s kid high-fiving a dinosaur-whale isn’t just state of the art CGI, it personifies the experience of feeling truly connected to the natural world, and it does so in a way that appeals to a childlike sense of hope that feels unencumbered by the cynicism that the world offscreen offers so readily. That is something you cannot experience in real life. That is storytelling. That is cinema. That is worth celebrating.![]() |
The Apartment (1960) |
Let’s return to the most common critique of Belle: "the music and animation are nice, sure, but what about the S T O R Y?" Well, the story is there in the music and the animation. When Suzu first steps into the technicolor metropolis of U and is so swept up in the realization that “I can finally sing again,” that is storytelling. The story doesn’t just pause while the audience is watching Suzu, whose own crippling anxiety has literally stolen her most unique asset, finally lose herself in song, so at home in the thralls of music that she doesn’t even notice her hecklers: that is the story.
Genre also bears some mention here because the expectation of what this marriage looks like varies between modes of film. Movies like the Knives Out films sell themselves on having an ornate plot arrangement, and the only way to ensure that is to not only have a solid track of cause-and-effect, but to also have it properly displayed for the audience to interact with. You need to have someone, tokenized as the detective character, be able to articulate with words the exact throughline connecting all the pieces. That is what makes a good mystery.
The internet tends to reward filmmakers like Christopher Nolan who sell themselves on creating intricate science-fiction puzzles that audiences try to solve alongside the protagonists. But there is more to storytelling than just CinemaSins-proofing your film. Cohesion looks different with a movie like Belle. It isn’t a puzzle to be solved, its payoff is almost purely emotional. The plotting still has to support the story, yes, but that story can be carried more by the swell of pathos than by pure plotting.
What exactly is Belle’s genre? Well, for one it’s a musical, which already puts it next to something like The Sound Music, whose payoffs are likewise almost entirely emotional.
There is after all a specific subset of this criticism that is somewhat unique to musicals. I’m referring to the classic complaint of “when are they going to stop singing so the story can keep going?” In musicals, at least good musicals, the story doesn’t just stop when the characters start singing. The story naturally spawns musical moments, and these moments enrich our understanding of the story. And if these sequences sometimes feel like they go on longer than what sense, that might be in part because we have temporarily set aside what feels logical in favor of feels true. Even something like the ten-minute dream ballet from Singin’ in the Rain serves as a statement on chasing the Hollywood dream, which is the thematic bedrock of the film. Musical storytelling engages a different part of your brain, and for that we should be grateful.
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The Boy and the World (2013) |
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Beauty and the Beast (1991) |

So
a film like Belle is clearly going to supplement its story with a lot of
pretty pictures. But I guess that doesn’t itself answer the question of whether
the story itself functions, and I think it is worth tracing out the mechanics
of the story at hand. What exactly is the plot of Belle?
What is the Plot?
Much of what a film accomplishes with plot can be understood through the lenses of either character arc or conflict. A solid film has a protagonist with a clearly defined want as well as a clearly defined need, and that becomes the basis of their character arc. Trying to move your character from one place to the other is inhibited by obstacles and forces that make this transformation difficult. The character working through that, whether or not they emerge triumphant, becomes the basis for the film's conflict. By way of example ...
Michael Curtiz' 1945 noir masterpiece, Mildred Pierce, features a robust character arc spurred by a powerful conflict. Mildred wants to be a good mother by supplying every material desire her daughters could imagine, but she needs to be mindful of the kind of character she is instilling in her daughters by making wealth the center of their existence. The conflict here is motivated by the pressures of being a single, uneducated mother as well as the vain ambitions of her eldest daughter. We could describe the film's external conflict as Mildred's raging against the economy and her internal conflict as Mildred wrestling with her own sense of inferiority. There is great synchronicity between the destination the film has set for its protagonist and the forces that get in the way of this.
Moving on to Belle, what does Suzu want, and what is stopping her from getting that? We see early on that although Suzu shows interest in connecting with her peers, she feels uncomfortable in group photos and only has a single close friend. In short, she feels she does not feel like she belongs.
These conflicts play out between two parallel plot lines across two worlds, one set in the world offline and one in the world of U. The former is the core of the story, and the latter is the sort of playground on which Suzu learns to resolve the issues in her offline life. These provide Suzu with dual battlegrounds on which she resolves her anxiety and processes her inner life. Her mission to find The Beast plays alongside her finding where she fits in the social pyramid of high school.
As Suzu becomes more comfortable with her Belle persona, she grows more at home with her offline crew. As she starts to engage with them on equal footing, she starts to learn more about them that dispels their air of mystery, that which previously made them inaccessible to her. Turns out the popular Ruka is actually crushing on the dorky Kamishin. Suzu eventually feels at peace having a relationship with Shinobu while the popular Ruka feels comfortable expressing her feelings for her crush.
Meanwhile, Suzu's online exploits see her navigating her own virtual identity with her living as her authentic self, which is put into conflict as the authorities of U try to hinder her efforts to understand and help the Beast. Suzu eventually finds that the Beast is actually a child named Kei living in Tokyo, and that the Beast’s unbeatable strength is a sort of token of the endurance Kei has gained protecting himself and his little brother from their abusive father. Where
I feel like the film tends to lose some people is in the sheer scope of the
story. Suzu’s story is itself straightforward, but it has a lot of appendages.
There are a lot of eggs in Belle’s basket, and if you try to tally them all, it
kind of feels like there is a lot more going on than the film should be able to
keep track of.
I guess the real question is whether the audience fully understands all the threads that feed into the film. This is where I guess one could argue that the film’s success is mixed. Belle asks you trace a lot of running plotlines into that culminating moment when Belle sings in front of the entirety of U. In my review, I actually remarked that while the scene was stunning to behold and while it felt right, I couldn’t actually tell you why Suzu singing was going to resolve the plot. That’s something I had to retrace upon further rewatches.
The Whole + The Sum of its Parts
By design, Belle invokes the fairy-tale of Beauty and the Beast, a fairy-tale that has been reimagined hundreds of times over hundreds of years. This becomes a part of how the audience processes and contextualizes the film as a whole. They are doing this with every dimension of the film, and there are a lot of dimensions to this film (internet culture, high school culture, the fairy-tale, trauma, child abuse, etc.) This is where you run into observations that the movie maybe has “too much plot to manage.”
Great films walk a fine line between simplicity and complexity. They know how to say a lot in the neatest way possible, and a lot of that comes down to identifying plot elements that serve the story. A film like Titanic can tell a three-hour story hinging on a straightforward theme like “only life is priceless,” but look at how the film builds this thesis through its runtime.

The "Beauty and the Beast" myth may not seem like the most natural launching pad for a story about a girl finding self-confidence as an internet celebrity, but one of the strengths of the film is that it finds those thin connective pieces that unite so many eclectic story elements and coalesces them into something beautiful.
There’s a lot that helps the film swallow a lot of genres, such that it genuinely feels like it was stitched together across centuries. A lot of this comes down to the interplay in the film’s visuals, weaving between timeless fairy-tale elements and contemporary technological elements, occasionally in the same frame. This is how you get things like the cops firing laser cannons at a fairy-tale monster sporting a princely garb, or a musical angel soaring across a digital metropolis atop a flying whale. (Again, you'll notice the film's visuals carrying a heavy load here.)
This kind of pastiche works here for the same reason it works in something like Who Framed Roger Rabbit (and its spiritual remake, Pokemon: Detective Pikachu). That film blends noir and neo-noir elements with 1940s cartoons to explore the intersection between cynicism and innocence, two elements that exist in a natural dialogue together. Two unlike things can have a powerful chemical reaction with one another if you know where the connective pieces are.
But the film leans upon story motifs of the genre as well. Suzu/Belle is a classic fairy-tale heroine living in smalltown Japan who just kind of happens upon extraordinarity not by aspiring for fame or position, but by being herself, or by being uncommonly kind. Suzu’s perceptiveness in seeing The Beast as a wounded soul who is acting out from a place of deep aching. And it’s through this blending of story templates that the film proves the eternal nature of the stories it’s invoking. Turns out a fairy-tale princess is just as at home here in the modern landscape as she was a hundred or so years ago.
Hosoda explains why he chose to use the internet as a springboard for this discussion, saying,
"Everyone has things that they will never tell anyone that they hide. Even if someone tells you they have no secrets, they do. There is always something that you feel you can't tell anybody, that's the nature of society today, that we feel we can't share or problems or our secrets ...
"In Suzu's case, it's this trauma that she feels about the loss of her mother that she can't really tell anyone, and how that is alleviated over the course of the film.”
So already we’re seeing how the choice of the internet as a setting complements the story of Suzu overcoming her fear of being judged. The reason why Suzu is even able to sing as Belle is because U provides her that cloak of anonymity that removes “Suzu” from the equation. U gives her a safe outlet to express her musical ability free of judgment. This sets up Suzu’s disguise as an imperative—Suzu being able to sing again is conditional upon her identity being kept secret, this is how it is for most of the characters on U. In Suzu’s eyes, U might love Belle, but they would hate Suzu.The adoration shown toward Belle is the reciprocal of something like the scorn shown toward the Beast. This also sets up one of Suzu’s strengths: she sees through the artifice of internet culture. Where the rest of the world sees the Beast as a monster, someone it’s okay to hate because he’s just that rotten, Suzu sees someone in pain. Is it really any wonder that we landed on the "Beauty and the Beast" archetype to tell this story--a story about learning to see humanity in something animal-like?
In that vein, telling
this story as a musical, in which our main character participates in a series of
singing numbers, opens a lot of avenues. Singing forces you to expose yourself to the judgment of others, and so
featuring key plotpoints as musical numbers again puts Suzu in that position
where she has to make herself vulnerable in order to advance the story. That's affinity of story elements.
I remember during that first viewing my main critique was that the film had no real stakes. The threat hanging over Suzu is the possibility of being “unveiled” by The Justices of U, which at the time felt like a weak consequence. I didn’t really understand why this would cause such a stir for the characters, but I also wasn’t really taking into account how this played off not only Suzu’s fears but also the way that so much of internet behavior hinges on anonymity.
We also see early on that though online anonymity enables this sort of dialogue, the problem is itself more ingrained in human behavior. The glib comments the neighbors made about Suzu’s mother after she dies saving the child (“Well that’s what happens when you try to be a hero,”) echo this same insensitivity that we see online. They talk about this woman who just saved someone’s life in a way that takes her humanness out of the process. This is the ecosystem in which a person like Suzu has to face her overwhelming anxiety.
That’s also one of the reasons why the film is about something much larger than “just the internet.” It’s revealing something about the human society that generates online toxicity and callousness in the first place. And part of the muscle behind this story is how it dismantles all that and shows just how kind the world can be in fleeting moments. One of the subtler threads in this arc is the story of Suzu coming to realize just how robust her support network is, seeing how many of her friends come together to help her rescue these kids. On first watch, the “dead mother” backstory was probably the plot element that I'd have identified as the most superfluous, an unnecessary ingredient in this film’s recipe, but again, additional viewings have continued to reveal its function in this kind of story. It not only helps focalize her sense of helplessness in a frightening world, it also sets up Suzu's hero’s journey. After her mother dies rescuing the child from the river, Suzu is left wondering why a person would risk their life for someone they didn’t know.
A Million Miles Away
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Mamoru Hosoda |
Professor, you have a gift for making me want to see a film that I either had no interest in seeing or had never heard of before your review. Thanks for another interesting and intriguing review!
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