Ani-May-Tion: Belle (Dir Mamoru Hosoda, 2h4m, 2021)

 It would be remiss of me to have a month dedicated to animation, and not include at least one film from the world of anime-after all, I turned May last year over to the medium in Ani-May, and even to the casual reader, I hope my love for Japanese animation does occasionally come through. The last few years have certainly been a halycion period of the medium on the small screen, but arguably the anime film has never been in ruder health, even as we enter the post Studio Ghibli period, with Hayao Miyazaki's likely swansong, How Do You Live? expected in the next year or so.  

We live in a golden age of anime, where the medium has long since passed on into the mainstream, no longer the preserve of arthouse or fleapit. Highlights since 2016 range from the triumphant ending of Hideaki Anno's almighty, epoch-defining Neon Genesis Evangelion in Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time (2021) to the bitter-sweet Maquia: When The Promised Flower Blooms (2018), where an immortal young woman must see her son age and die, to the neon-blasted and unapologetically queer Promare (2019), to the cinematic goliath that is Demon Slayer:Mugen Train (2020), in which the popular series continues in a breakneck adventure.

Atop anime, though, stand two titans; whilst western media tend to daub them as successors to Miyazaki, Makoto Shinkai and Mamoru Hosoda are, undeniably, unique figures, rather than the godfather of anime come again. Shinkai's filmography, from Your Name to Weathering with You to Five Centimetres a Second is at once a technical masterclass, his films bordering on photorealism in their backgrounds, and superbly observed depictions of people's lives intersecting in often magical-realism-tinted stories of life. They call to mind an animated answer to Kubrick, in which the modern Japan and the ever-more isolated lives so many Japanese live juxtaposes with the fantastical in minute, often clinical detail.

Hosoda's work, meanwhile, is far more character-driven, often exploring the bonds between family, from siblings in Our War Game and Mirai to father/son relationships in The Boy and the Beast, whilst Wolf Children explores the bond between mother and son. Whilst his films are as much of a technical marvel as Shinkai, Hosoda uses his worlds, often fantastical or near-future digital realms, to springboard into jaw-dropping moments of beauty, scale and ambition. Hosoda's films feel, for a body of work in which bonds are desperately held to, where digital worlds are places of connection, not isolation, and where families are fought and forged, at points staggeringly human.

For the past twenty years, thus, these two directors have steadily become the mainstream, Hosoda arriving from the hallowed Studio Ghibli, and becoming a journeyman of adapting Digimon and long-running series, One Piece for theatres, before The Girl Who Leapt through Time made him a household name, and Summer Wars cemented it, whilst Shinkai's short films She and Her Cat and Voices of a Distant Star built him a following that, through The Place Promised in Our Early Days and 5 Centimeters per Second onward, leads all the way to his modern oeuvre. So far, it has felt balanced, a long-distance conversation between two men on the state, the hopes, the dreams, of their country, via animated cinema.

And then came along Belle, a love-letter to animation, to music, to musicals, using the tried and tested structure of La Belle et la Bête, of Beauty and the Beast, a story that's given us everything from King Kong to Cocteau's extraordinary 1946 adaption, to arguably the greatest Disney film period, in the form of the 1991 adaption that Belle itself cannot but pay homage to. In its tale of a young woman, stricken and voiceless with grief at the loss of her mother stepping into a digital world to become a singer that has this other-world enraptured, an act places her on a collision course with the shadowy and feared beast of this world, so Hosoda has not just made the best film of his career so far, but laid down the ultimate gauntlet to his great rival.

Like many of Hosoda's films, Belle's opening is a lavish opening salvo, a showcase, as his films tend to be of theirs most arresting sensibilities. For Belle, this is two fold; first, undeniably, its use of songs-anime is, after all, compared to its Western counterparts, not especially known for its musicals-and, secondly, Hosoda's characteristic visual ambition. Both of these are on display from the very introduction of the virtual world, U, and of Belle herself, arriving into the film in ornate dress atop a speaker-stacked whale. This, though, is only half the picture. Like few anime before it, the song (both in Japanese and in English), plays a vital part in introducing our heroine. Fittingly, for a virtual pop-star, it's a smart slice of J-pop inflected with the imagination that's made Miku Hatsune a household name around the world, with Japanese electronic group millennium parade and Kaho Nakamura/Kylie McNeill (also Belle's seiyuu/voice actress) essentially setting up the film's tone, and its heroine from its very first frames

We are greeted, in this opening parade that shows off the pure scale of U, in a sequence that one can't help but compare to the introduction of OZ in Summer Wars, with Hosoda's ambition, but also with a startlingly fresh concept. Belle doesn't look like your average anime character, but closer to the heroines of a very different animation style. Belle's design is best described as a mix of Disney Princess and Japanese anime heroine, the mouth and face animation in particular, brought to life by Disney veteran Jin Kim, treading a perfect mix of both schools of animation in its detail and realism. It is with Belle's introduction, that that the film leaps back in time to present some context to its heroine, and the girl behind the virtual pop-star’s mask.

Thus, we are are introduced to what seems, at first, like Belle's polar opposite, Suzu; Suzu, traumatised at an early age by the death of her mother-a moment of abandonment that leaves her unable to sing, distant from her father, and with few friends, cuts a lonely figure, and one left fragile and alienated by her loss. Whilst Belle's introduction is colossal, all-encompassing and utterly assured, Suzu seems to positively creep onto screen, introduced in the hustle and bustle of school, with only her friend Hiroka (Lilas Ikuta/Jessica DiCicco, who quickly becomes her manager as Belle) and Shinobu (Ryō Narita/Manny Jacinto) as her friend and protector-cum-crush as companions.

When Hiroka introduces her to U, it is with trepidation that she creates an avatar and joins-whilst the new world is liberating enough that she almost immediately finds her singing voice again, in a moment that openly shows the influence from Disney's animated musicals, as she bursts into song, it is met with indifference to hostility, and she finds herself returning to the real world having only made a couple of friends, including a mysterious angel-avatar, only to awake the next day to her impromptu performance having gone viral, her appearance picked over by U's users and fellow virtual pop-star, Peggie Sue. With Hiro now managing her appearances and performances, the film begins to take on a rags-to-riches tale of Belle becoming famous and popular. It is at one of her concerts, though, that the film suddenly, and spectacularly changes tacks.

Enter, thus, the Beast (Takeru Satoh/Paul Castro Jr), and enter, in his wake, not just the Gaston-esque figure of Justin (a sublime bit of character design, garbing this figure in the guise of a superhero, defending U from the beast, and voiced by Toshiyuki Morikawa/Chace Crawford), but the veritable flotilla of baggage that comes from the story of Beauty and the Beast. The Beast (interchangably called The Dragon in the Japanese voice track), is himself an absolutely effortless masterclass, turning from the familar leonine form of Jean Marais and his descendants, including Robby Benson and Disney's take on the creature to an altogether more unsettling creature, with long, dragon-like snout, and a cloak covered in mottled bruises of colour. He is also, as he cuts through swathes of Justin's men, an almost unstoppable force of nature, Hosoda swapping from tight closeups as he crashes through security, to almost minimalist longshots as he is framed in torchlight, before making an escape out of the roof of the colossal dome in which Belle performs.

His appearance, sowing of chaos, and just as sudden disappearance proceeds to send the film spinning off into a masterful digital detective story for much of its middle third, in which suspects thought to be the creature are identified, from an agressive and shadowy modern artist whose complicated love life spills out into the real world, to a lonely middle-aged woman whose idealised life is found to be nothing more than stock-images and lies, to the Dragon's curious fandom among young children, where he is seen to be an avenging hero and protector. The film matches this, smartly, with Suzu's attempts to assist her friends' lovelives in the real world, whilst a choir her mother was part of tries to convince the young woman that she can still sing.

It is also here, as Belle herself begins to search for the Beast in U, that the film's most overt homages to the 1991 film begin to appear, in evocative and, thanks to Cartoon Saloon's unmistakable work on the film's backgrounds, a masterful hybird of eastern and western animation styles. Stumbling across a castle, guided by the ghostly avatar, so Belle/Suzu comes face to face, and despite his antagonistic outward personality, the two eventually become close, the film evocatively recreating the dance between Belle and the Beast, as the duo dance across a starlit sky. Yet, it never feels like pastiche, never feels like anything less than a loving homage to a titan of the medium. Nor does it overshadow the rest of the film, or reduce it to saccarine homage.

The instigator of much of the film's darkness is Justin, who, in comparison to the braggart Gaston of many other adaptions, is a cunning and shrewd foil to Belle and the Beast. No sooner has he captured her, as she is cornered leaving the castle, than he is threatening everything she's built on U by revealling Belle's true identity. The Beast's castle is soon destroyed, and the Beast is forced to flee before Justin reveals his identity, leading Suzu and Hiroka to race against time to find the beast before U's avenging guardian can. It's here that the film delves, with great sensitity and pathos, into the cycles of abuse that the figure behind the beast suffers, and the reason for his rage and bruises, and it is Belle that comes to the rescue of the Beast, in a remarkable inversion of the classic structure of the tale.

It's also here that the film once again pivots; from being a film about hiding one's identity behind a mask to uncovering the true self, with a denoument that masterfully steps between the two, whilst Belle's connection to the Beast becomes the driving force of spectacular setpieces and intimate moments that leave us with our heroine finding her voice once more in the flesh and blood world, standing on her own two feet, and stepping out from the world of Belle into her own identity and her own voice.

It may not be as dramatic an ending as some of Hosoda's other picture, but the journey, simply put, is perhaps his most rewarding. From its charming heroine to Mamoru Hosoda's almost unerring ability to place that moment that breaks or fixes your heart in the most tear-inducing way, to the bold experiment in animation and exploring a genre little plumbed in modern anime, Belle is a film that, on grand scale, reminds you how striking, how original, and how emotional anime can be. I adore this film. I dare anyone not to fall in love with it.

Belle, simply put, may be the new yardstick for post-Ghibli anime, a resounding love-letter to Beauty and the Beast & the 1991 Disney adaption, against the background of a grief-stricken girl trying to find her voice in a virtual world, in the strongest Hosoda film for a decade.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

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