The animated Japanese feature Belle makes a case against getting lost in fantasy.
The animated Japanese feature Belle makes a case against getting lost in fantasy.
M elding Beauty and the Beast with Ready Player One, the Japanese animated feature Belle fashions an affecting young-adult drama out of the tensions between teens’ online identities and their actual selves.
A shy, freckled, plain-looking adolescent girl in Japan named Suzu has spent years mired in sadness after her mother drowned while trying to save someone’s life. Suzu barely talks to her father, and her only friend at school is a girl named Hiro, a cynical schemer who specializes in questionable advice.
All of the kids — all of the world, maybe — live to go online to join a role-playing game called U. The online world is built on an intriguing twist: Instead of everyone picking their own avatars, the game picks one for you, using constantly refreshed biometric information to create an avi who brings out your hidden characteristics and showcases the true self no one knows. Most people’s avatars are animals and freaks, but Suzu’s turns out to be a gorgeous pop star named Belle who dazzles the world with her beauty and singing. Suzu herself has been unable to sing at all since her mom died.
The Beast figure is called the Dragon, a misunderstood monster in the online game who is forever getting into fights with mobs who want to destroy him. When that fails, a social-media movement grows to unmask the Dragon, but meanwhile Belle (who faces her own danger of being unmasked and revealed to be a nobody) falls in love with him and visits his elaborately imagined castle. The Dragon is renowned for his anger and aggression, but Belle notices that his back is covered with throbbing, colorful bruises, which provide a hint as to whom he might be in real life.
Director Mamoru Hosoda, who scored an Oscar nomination three years ago with his film Mirai, delivers a lot of visual pop and dazzle in the fantasy scenes, but the clash between the online fantasy and dismal reality produces something of a whiplash effect; climactic scenes balance concerns with child abuse with a fantasy pop concert delivered on a flying whale.
For all of the film’s visual energy, it’s a bit slow in its pacing, and young people raised on fast-paced, joke-enriched Disney cartoons may find it a bit ponderous. Moreover, the movie makes too much out of Belle’s signature song, an overproduced and lachrymose ballad of the Celine Dion school.
The most compelling scenes are the ones in which the awkward teens try to make personal connections IRL. Belle discovers that even the most popular girl in school has no idea how to talk to a boy, which is doubly worrisome because the boy has no idea how to talk to her either, and the two of them writhe and blanche and stammer and generally freak out when Belle tries to get them together. No wonder the fertility rate in Japan is 1.34 kids per woman. Electronic obsessions marketed as bringing people together are driving them ever further apart.
The film (which was a big hit in Japan last year) may be attractive to young people because it appears to validate the intoxicating aspects of fantasy life — the motto of the online game is “You can’t start over in reality, but you can start over in U” — but it takes a welcome turn in its final act. Though our online personas may be able to fight like superheroes or sing like superstars, it turns out that the ordinary people we are in meatspace are far more interesting. The more online the world gets (and Japan is probably a leader in that category), the more we lose track of who everyone actually is. Twitter lately has started attaching a pathetic, wan little message asking users to be considerate before they haul out the 280-character flamethrower: “Don’t forget the human behind the screen.”
Ready Player One, which both cursed and reveled in the possibilities of a world gone virtual, made a half-hearted plea for putting down the electronic gizmos for maybe one day a week, but Belle goes a bit deeper. It suggests that what’s most notable, most personal, about the avatars isn’t the amazing feats they’re capable of, but their bruises, which tell a story about their humanity. By the end of the movie, the adolescent protagonists are out walking in nature, and there’s a trembling sensation that maybe these kids might be able to break through the screens and discover something real about one another.
