Director: Mamoru Hosoda
Starring: Kaho Nakamura, Ryô Narita, Shôta Sometani, Tina Tamashiro
Distributor: Kismet Unit Trust
Runtime: 124 mins. Reviewed in Feb 2022
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc

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Rating notes: Mild themes and animated violence

A 21st century Japanese animation version of Beauty and the Beast. Suzu is a melancholic young girl who enters the cyberworld of U, her beautiful and singing avatar, Belle, and finding a mission to help the Beast.

Japanese animation – film and television, as well as computer games – has constantly developed and become more popular over the decades. Studio Ghibli has been dominating in films. However, Belle comes from Studio Chizu, writer-director, Mamoru Hosoda (Summer Wars, The Boy and the Beast). His imagination is vast in both the narrative and the visuals of Belle.

As the title indicates, this is a variation on the Beauty and the Beast tale. And, it is very much a 21st-century variation. Immediately, the audience is introduced to a cyber-universe. While we live in an ordinary real world, there is a technologically and structured universe, called U, where humans can create their avatars and live and enthuse vicariously in this U world via the avatars.

One of the popular celebrities of U is Belle – beautiful, dignified and charming all the avatars with her singing. (And, by way of animation variation, there are all kinds of strange looking comic creatures as the avatars.)

In real life, Belle is a young girl from a village, Suzu, a sad girl, living with her father and the dread memories of how her loving mother plunged into icy waters to rescue a stranded little girl – and lost her life. Suzu is melancholic, goes to school and observes the successful students, is reluctant to participate in the activities of a group of women who are like guardian angels to her, a choir. She also has a young friend who is a computer nerd, always at her screen, controlling Belle.

The complication is when another avatar arrives, the Beast (resembling the Disney character). He is in conflict with Belle. In the meantime, there is a young friend from school days who is her protector, a rather comic character who is a kayak champion, and all of them want to help Suzu. Suzu is finally revealed as Belle, Suzu being without her avatar, singing as herself.

And the culmination of the film is Suzu’s mission, taking the courage to travel by train to Tokyo, search for and rescue two children bullied by their father, a boy with the avatar of the Beast, and Suzu trusted by him, becoming as herself, not her avatar, a true heroine.

Kismet