A Thousand Words for Mamoru Hosoda's Belle

    Being a film critic is certainly one of the more savory stations in life, but it's not without its frustrations. 

    One of the most irritating of these is the expectation to just produce a perfectly sound summation of a film's merits and limitations after just a single viewing of the relevant film--and to do so 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 since I did give the film the thumbs up, calling it possibly the most beautifully animated film to date. And even now I remember being overwhelmed by multiple sequences within the film. 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. Naturally, 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 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. 

          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. I want to trace out how this film goes about bringing them all together, while also musing on how these two competing aspects of storytelling–visuals and plot–can and should complement one another. Because giving your artists time and resources enough to make their art look lifelike is the easy part (though some films still manage to drop the ball). Creating something that feels truthful, on the other hand, that makes up the difference between a pretty picture and something transformative. 

 

Intro to Belle and Mamoru Hosoda

            Belle takes place in a future obsessed with the virtual world of U, an all-encompassing social media system where users activate their individual avatar and interact with one another anonymously across a virtual playground. Anyone can lose themselves in the world of U, even an anxiety-ridden high school girl like Suzu, who lost her ability to sing after she lost her mother at a young age. In U, though, she takes on the persona of Belle, an angelic singing goddess who instantly earns the adoration of the world. 

            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.

            Viewers may be most familiar with Mamoru Hosada through his work with Digimon or Dragon Ball Z. But for the last twenty-ish years, Hosoda has branched off into his own body of anime films as a director. Ever since 2006 he’s been on a fairly consistent 3-year calendar, putting out classics like Wolf Children and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. My actual favorite of his films is probably his 2015 offering, The Boy and the Beast. (Imagine the overlapping parts of Avatar: The Last Airbender and Pokémon being used to tell a Karate Kid story that also explores why dudes can’t say “I love you” to one another.)

If you’re wondering why I’m giving space for Hosada’s larger filmography, it's partly because I want to provide a fuller context for this essay’s topic, and it’s also because I simply think he is a fantastic filmmaker and will do everything I can to see that his work is brought to the mainstream. 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 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.

 

Story vs Spectacle?

            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 would-be-active 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 language or 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, in part because the image itself is beautiful to look at, 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, and this 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.

    You see this story vs spectacle argument deployed most often when there is talk of the story being too easy to discern, but I'd argue that this argument is more applicable when the exact opposite is true--when the narrative is harder to glean. Something like the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels where things like character motivation or set-up and pay-off are lost or even just forgotten beneath the layers of computer-generated mucus. When a story's framework is solid, spectacle can fill in almost any percent of the storytelling.  

            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. Belle 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. 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.

The Boy and the World (2013)

           Animation as a “genre” also bears mentioning here. And I put “genre” in quotes here because I know there’s a widely circulated grievance within the animation community about the concept of the “animation genre.” Prominent filmmakers in this field have expressed irritation with animation itself being classified as a “genre” rather than a medium. From what I can tell, this comes a lot from the masses casually lumping a film like Ratatouille with a film like Minions. But I think it’s still useful to look at the kinds of stories that work best through animation.

            As we discussed in our study of Disney animated musicals, animation is a medium that lends itself to musical expression. The dreamlike look of animation lends itself to the romanticism of song, as does the ability to create virtually anything with just the sketching of a pencil. This heightened version of reality is one asset that animation has over photorealistic live-action filmmaking. Moreover, when every element of your image was created by hand by your artist, there is greater weight given to the image’s power to push the story forward. 

            As one example, let’s look at the “Lend Me Your Voice” number. This is where we see Suzu helping the Beast peel back his layers of anger to reveal the gentle soul that U would have never bothered to look for, and it’s a scene heavy with spectacle. A part of this is the way that the scene is itself rich in animation, but the film is also imparting a lot through visual shorthand. The sequence uses a flower motif for Belle’s character, likening her to something soft and bringing joy, contrasting the monstrous demeanor we’ve come to associate with the Beast. There’s also visual storytelling with the close-up of the Beast with his hand on his heart, again reminding us that this monster has a tenderness that betrays his rageful affect. The scene sees Beast engaging in a ritual of manners with Belle when they start dancing together, the sincerity of their affection so encompassing that it ultimately lifts them off the ground and carries them into the heavens. (Homage is also a part of visual storytelling. If you recognize this ballroom dance from maybe another telling of the “Beauty and the Beast” story, you would be in good company.)

            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?      

            Let’s start with character arc: 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. 

    Suzu’s paralyzing anxiety seems to come from two major sources. One is simply a straightforward casualty of being a teenage girl and struggling to find your place. The second is more specific to Suzu’s story. She lost her mother at a young age when her mother ran into a river to rescue a child from drowning, and the trauma from that loss leaves her feeling vulnerable in a frightening world. Adding to that the unresolved tension within Suzu about why her mother left her to save some random child, and you have a solid basis for a character arc. The film even crafts a token of Suzu’s trauma, that being the loss of her singing voice. 

    Moving on, what are the film’s main conflicts?

            The film’s internal conflict comes from Suzu needing to be comfortable with her own skin. The external conflict is between Suzu and the judgment of the world. Becoming an online superstar gives Suzu a space to not only get in touch with this part of herself, but also experience something like validation. When Suzu senses a wounded heart in The Beast, she naturally feels compelled to try to find a way to help him. But of course, she does this at the risk of losing U's love and possibly facing its wrath instead.

    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 the air of mystery to them. 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. Suzu begs Kei to tell her where he is so she can help him, but Kei does not believe that Suzu is really Belle, nor does he really believe that she would actually have his best interests at heart. Suzu realizes that the only way to earn his trust is to give up the guise of anonymity that all of U thrives on, and unveil herself to all of U. This is where the two conflicts crash into each other: if Suzu is going to help Kei, she has to sacrifice the thing she depends on most.

            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. You have the running plot of Rose being caught in a crossroads where she can choose to leave her life of stifling comfort for one of meaning and fulfillment, which the story manifests as a choice between two potential suitors. You've also got this expensive diamond that everyone's chasing, something of infinite financial value but whose ultimate worth is revealed to be nothing. This is all culminates in a real-life tragedy wherein hundreds of people lose their lives needlessly. This film works in large part because it creates a wealth of opportunities for Rose to consider what it means to live, both literally and figuratively. 

            Does Belle have the same affinity of elements? 

            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. This further reflects the genius of using the "Beauty and the Beast" archetype, a story about finding beauty and value in something that lacks outward signifiers of such things, to make a comment about seeing beyond internet performativity.

           In that vein, telling this story as a musical in which our main character participates in a series of singing numbers is another solid choice for this story. 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. Affinity of story elements.

              I remember during that first viewing my main critique was that it felt like 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. They talk about this woman who just saved someone’s life in a way that takes her humanness out of the process in a way that is so easy when you have no personal investment in the matter. (I myself have had the experience of reading comments on the article reporting my dad’s fatal car accident where random strangers were commenting on whether he was driving too fast.) This is the ecosystem in which a person like Suzu has to face her overwhelming anxiety. 

            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. And it’s only when Suzu herself becomes a sort of lifeguard to The Beast that she understands why. This not only eases her insecurity that her mother left her because she wasn’t loveable, it also helps Suzu to comprehend her own heroism. This is also communicated visually without Suzu herself commenting on it through dialogue, and it culminates in an illustrious display of light and color, manifesting in visual form an emblem of the majesty and grace that we have always known to be intrinsic to Suzu as a person. Visual storytelling.

 A Million Miles Away

      I feel like it's easy to discount a film for achieving visual excellence for the same reason it's easy to discount film for engaging primarily with the heart rather than the intellect. There's an impulse with internet culture to distrust something whose appeal can't be objectively measured. Moreover, genuinely liking something requires genuine vulnerability, something not readily offered within the YouTube comment sections. That's something this film understands on multiple levels. 

Mamoru Hosoda

    Certainly, a film like Belle isn't going to inspire the same pushback that a film like Avatar can by simple virtue of audience reach. Anime has a sustainable fanbase, even within the United States, but I still wouldn't call it mainstream, and Hosoda is still an emerging filmmaker in U.S. markets. Of course, that represents its own vulnerability, which is one of the reasons it's important to seek out films that aren't yet in the public arena. There are simply too many good films out there to only be content with what is currently mainstream.

    There's a widely spread assumption amid media consumers that as one's discernment develops, one becomes less taken by the visual elements of a film, but that just hasn't been my experience at all. Spectacle is just one of many tools at a filmmaker's disposal, and just like the writing or performance, it can interact with the viewer to create something like a spiritual experience. A truly great film is at times, even for a film school brat who spent three years shelling out film essay after film essay, simply beyond words.

             --The Professor