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‘Belle’ Review: Soaring and Singing Over the Online Rainbow

In this gorgeous anime, a high school student journeys into a virtual world and finds herself amid cute, kooky and menacing fellow users.

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By Manohla Dargis

Colors and hearts explode in “Belle,” and your head might too while watching this gorgeous anime. Set in the undefined future, it envisions a reality that resembles our own, with the same drab institutions and obligations, the same confusing relationships and feelings. Suzu (voiced and sung by Kaho Nakamura), a melancholic high school student, lives with her father (Koji Yakusho) and still mourns her long-dead mother. Suzu exists in a miasma of grief, one she fleetingly escapes by entering a computer simulation.

Described as “the ultimate virtual community” and cleverly named U, this other-world is an entertainment but also a refuge. A dazzling phantasmagoria, it allows customers to log out of their reality by slipping into an avatar in the U space. Once inside, users — their real selves obscured by eccentric, sometimes aspirational cartoonish identities — have seemingly unfettered freedom. They can cut loose, bop around like tourists, become someone else or maybe find themselves. “You can’t start over in reality,” Suzu hears when she first fires up the program, “but you can start over in U.” The catch? Everyone is still on social media.

Journeys of self-discovery dominate much of contemporary animated cinema, even if the routes and mileage vary. “It’s time to see what I can do/To test the limits and break through,” as Elsa sings in “Frozen.” Suzu’s pilgrimage is somewhat complicated — certainly visually — but she too needs to “let it go” and cut free of her past and her trauma, an agony that the story doesn’t soften. Suzu is unequivocally, openly sad. Her shoulders sag and her head bows, she blunders and shrinks from others, sighing and weeping. Even so, she also questions, searches and keeps trying to sing. She lost her voice to grief; she wants it back.

Suzu is a poignant, sympathetic figure but there’s a welcome edge to her, a bit of stubborn prickliness that’s expressed through the animation, the character’s churning emotions and Nakamura’s sensitive, expansive vocal performance. The character design employs the pert nose, heart-shaped face and huge eyes that are standard in anime, but these conventions never feel static because Suzu isn’t. Delicately perched on that unstable boundary between childhood and adulthood, she slips from the comically juvenile (mouth agape) to soberly mature. She can seem younger or older than she is, but she’s never less than human.

Before you meet her, though, the writer-director Mamoru Hosoda introduces U’s virtual reality, giving you a seductive eyeful. (His movies include “ Mirai ” and “Wolf Children.”) The first image in “Belle” is of a thin, pale horizontal line cutting across the otherwise black frame, a visual that wittily suggests the first line in a drawing. This line rapidly changes and, as it does, the contours of the U world emerge, as do its mysteries, oddities, personalities and possibilities. At first, the line seems to consist of a series of rectangular shapes that look like beads on a necklace, a design that amusingly evokes the spaceship in “2001: A Space Odyssey” — and then it explodes into the kaleidoscopic realm of science fiction and U.

A rapturously beautiful expanse filled with whirling candy colors and charming character designs, U gives Suzu a virtual reality escape and gives you a great deal to go gaga over. That introductory straight line soon expands, growing evermore complex and giving way to intricate geometric forms. As the shapes shift and mutate, Hosoda uses old-fashioned perspective — differing sizes and planes, parallel edges and vanishing points — to create an illusion of movement through depth. That’s crucial for the user (and viewer) experience in U, where rectangles turn into what look like parts of a motherboard only to then transform into mazelike spaces that give way to soaring buildings in a crowded modern cityscape.

Suzu enters this sphere through an app on her cellphone. With a few clicks, she is over the rainbow and flying through U, where she becomes Belle, a hyperbolic beauty with a plaintive singing voice and a billowing curtain of pretty pink hair. The U app’s “body-sharing technology” allows users to experience U alongside other revelers, to interact with an array of colorful, comical and vividly imagined beings, some borrowed and tweaked from myth (or thereabouts), others plucked from pop-culture climes. Some of these appear more human than others; more than a few look like collectible anime figurines with exaggerated features and body parts. It’s a raging party of the cute and the kooky, though with shivers of menace.

Suzu continues to travel between reality and U as the story evolves and takes a detour into a fairy tale. Much of what ensues after this narrative turn is familiar, and while not everything that happens then works equally well it’s unfailingly touching. Hosoda throws drama, meanies and a couple of romantic rivals (predictable cuties with floppy hair) into the mix, but to his credit, the story remains focused on its heroine. Suzu is moving between two different, outwardly irreconcilable worlds — each with its own textures, shapes and colors — a divide that reflects and speaks to her internal struggles. And while she sets out to escape, what she finally needs is to find a sense of wholeness even when everything seems broken.

Belle Rated PG for mild virtual violence. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. In theaters.

Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic of The Times since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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‘Belle’ Review: A Feminist Beauty and the Beast Fable for the Digital Era

Anime master Mamoru Hosoda imagines another forward-thinking virtual world, “U,” using it as the backdrop for an empowering musical fairy-tale.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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With “ Belle ,” anime master Mamoru Hosoda has reimagined “Beauty and the Beast” for the metaverse set — that young generation of social media users who switch identities comfortably between the physical world and a more inviting online one.

Roughly half the movie takes place in the “real world” (which is to say, a traditional cartoon rendering of modern-day Japan, where hand-drawn teenagers worry about who’s popular at school and how to get noticed by the classmates they find cute), while the fairy-tale portion is set on an ultra-popular virtual platform called “U,” where the main character appears as a slender pink Disney princess type: Belle.

In U, members assume an alternate identity/avatar (or “AS”) that allows them to more fully express certain dimensions of their personalities. Here, Hosoda appears to have tapped into a central anxiety of modern adolescence: the concern that others could never truly know or accept all of one’s nuances and contradictions, just as in nearly every telling of this classic story, only Belle can see the goodness in the Beast.

For more than 20 years, Hosoda has been refining a vision of the way that virtual realms extend, enhance and complicate modern life — from the Digital Realm depicted in his two “Digimon Adventure” movies to the stark white Oz of “Summer Wars.” Visually complex as those iterations were, nothing compares to U, as Hosoda packs an Imax-worthy level of detail into his depiction of a vast parallel world/playground, which looks like a cross between a noir-and-neon “Matrix”-like megacity and a dust mote’s view of a PC motherboard, where chips loom like skyscrapers in the background.

Populated by some 5 billion registered users, U promises that once people have plugged into their devices, pesky restrictions such as gravity need not apply, and everyone is free to be themselves. (Fine, but what do people actually do in U? The concept suggests more questions than it can answer, relying on a “don’t ask, just go with it” style of storytelling.)

Before joining U, Suzu is a relatively introverted high school student. Much is made of the fact she has freckles, which become a defining aspect of her AS — a row of bright fuchsia triangles imprinted across her cheeks, like some kind of trend-setting makeup. Shy and emotionally scarred from the loss of her mother several years earlier, Suzu lives way out in the sticks, far from her classmates, and spends much of her time alone or else fumbling awkwardly around the few friends she has at school (which include computer-whiz Hiroka and protective male comrade Shinobu). Flashbacks show her making music with her mother, though even the thought of singing makes her physically ill these days — which is one of the many liberating aspects of this new technology for Suzu.

From the moment she arrives in U, she’s able to express herself through song. “Belle” isn’t a musical in the traditional sense, although Hosoda gives the character multiple opportunities to belt out ethereal emotional anthems, casting Japanese singer-songwriter Kaho Nakamura to handle both speaking and performing aspects of the role. (For the English dub, virtual unknown Kylie McNeill proves just as stunning — especially considering the gifted vocalist has fewer than 500 Instagram followers at the moment.) Hosoda wanted a fresh, unique sound, and though Belle eventually becomes the most popular personality in U, her virtual peers don’t know what to make of her inaugural performance, sniping from the sidelines. “I can’t stand show-offs,” grouses one. “She’s not ugly, but…” huffs another.

As with many a viral sensation before her, it takes time for people to discover Belle’s talents, and once they do, the messaging is mixed. Some adore her, others are downright jealous or cruel, but practically everyone wants to know who her true identity: the real you behind the U front. Remember, Suzu can’t even bring herself to sing karaoke, but through Belle, she’s able to unleash the voice that’s been bottled up insider her. And just as Belle is about to give her first massive arena concert, the show is interrupted by the arrival of the Beast, an aggressive, wolf-headed character who represents the bad-boy antithesis to Belle’s delicate pop princess (whose Disney-esque look was designed and overseen by Jin Kim, a veteran of the American animation studio).

In U, the Beast easily manages to terrorize everyone — everyone except for Belle, who responds with curiosity and compassion. Oddly enough, the Beast seems to be the only user who dares misbehave in this environment, which, if it were anything like Facebook or Fortnite, would be a lot more familiar with people acting out behind the shield of anonymity. No matter. Together with best friend Hiroka, Belle determines to identify who this seemingly misunderstood rebel really is. Storywise, it probably would’ve been more efficient for the Beast simply to have kidnapped Belle as he tries to make his escape (at least that way, the two characters would’ve been forced together early), but Hosoda seems committed to making Suzu a strong, proactive protagonist, leading the movie on a long tangent full of dead ends and red herrings as she and Hiroka go about their investigation.

“Belle” works best when our attention is on its title character, less so when the story shifts back to Suzu. The most iconic scene occurs midway through, when Belle finds and embraces her beast, singing “Lend Me Your Voice” as he temporarily drops the tough-guy act in her presence. But there’s still another hour to navigate, as Suzu and company gather around computer monitors, zooming in on details (like a glimpse of Belle reflected in the eyeball of a kid they hear humming that private song) and trying to untangle a puzzle that becomes less and less interesting as the source of the Beast’s temper comes into focus.

Hosoda has created an infinite-possibility universe in which to set this tale, and the at times convoluted story can’t help feeling limiting as our imaginations tease all the stuff being ignored in U’s more intriguing corners. Still, there’s something undeniably empowering in the way U (and by extension Hosoda) recognizes the inner strengths in people who themselves don’t fully understand what they’re capable of. Belle’s big moment — when she risks being “unveiled” (having her identity revealed) in order to reconnect with whoever’s hiding behind the Beast’s monstrous AS — feels like a scene destined for anime history. In a sense, movies aren’t so different from the virtual worlds a platform like U offers, and this one promises a special kind of escapism while going out of its way to keep it real.

Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival, July 12, 2021. (Also in Animation Is Film Festival.) MPAA Rating: PG. Running time: 121 MIN. (Original title: “Ryû to sobakasu no hime”)

• Production: (Animated – Japan) A GKIDS (in U.S.), Toho (in Japan) release of a Studio Chizu production. Producers: Yuichiro Saito, Genki Kawamura, Nozomu Takahashi. Executive producers: Keiichi Sawa, Kyo Ito, Nobuaki Tanaka, Takeshi Kikuchi, Yuka Saito. Animation producer: Hiroyuki Ishiguro.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Mamoru Hosoda. Camera: Ryo Horibe, Manabu Kadouno, Yohei Shimozawa. Editor: Shigeru Nishiyama. Music: Ludvig Forssell, Yuta Bandoh, Miho Hazama. Animation director: Hiroyuki Aoyama.
• With: Voice cast (English dub): Kylie McNeill, Chace Crawford, Paul Castro Jr., Manny Jacinto, Hunter Schafer, Brandon Engman, Jessica DiCicco.

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