The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison finds the latest animé by Mamoru Hosoda BELLE (Japan, 2021)

Mamoru Hosoda is a heavy hitter in the world of Japanese animé. He’d been on the edge of my radar after I’d had a mixed reaction to his Okami kodomo no ame to yuki/ The Wolf Children. It’s easy to treat him as a Miyazaki  imitator. 

His new film Belle, The Dragon and the Freckled Princess  centres in one of those familiar Japanese toon teen school girls, with Susu (Voice Kaho Nakamura), our isolated heroine, exploring the digital universe U but her adventures are less fantastic, more connected to the real world in a way that is sometimes disturbing. (“Why was a stranger’s life more important than mine?”) It’s off-putting to find child abuse and internet trolling mixed in with fairies and a  princess designed by Disney veteran, Jim Kim.

The opening holds out hope of something substantial where she and her glasses-wearing school chum create a digital character who rides flying whales and enchants all with her singing, gathering an unexpected hoard of followers and the enmity of the previous net diva. This one is entering the select company of  Avatar, In and Out  and Ready Player One. 

The first glimpse of U, floating in its pink cloud rallying swarms of anthropomorphic visitors, is a dazzler and sets a standard which the film is not altogether equal to, though it does come up with striking visuals like the background waterfalls the characters pass, another animated metro train or the devastated castle.

Plot develops with Susu unable to interest her old school mate now a star jock and turning away from reality to what becomes a re-cap of  “Beauty and the Beast.” Her character is called Belle and the monster lives in a castle where she finds a rose, in case you’re slow on the uptake. The sinister human monster with the scarred back is pursued by white superhero suit troopers, in a surprise inversion, and our heroine has to deal with an assault by foreign language dialogue balloons and attempted unmaskings aimed at discrediting her computerised singing voice.

This is occasionally interrupted by real-world activity like the crush of her chum on the gawky school skulling champ. The Japanese girls in the row behind me kept on getting the giggles in the romantic bits. Whether this was embarrassment or derision I’m not sure.

After this one, Mamoru Hosoda has moved into my sphere of interest and I must make an effort to see his other work. The short theatrical run has ended, which is a pity because the film’s elaborate detail benefits from big screen but it’s in the hands of a local distributor so it's going to be accessible one way or another.