Beauty in the Beast but make it anime (Belle Review) | 30 Days of TWIR #15

Day 15. Thank God. We're halfway through. And now we're talking about Bell, suggested by Alec Kubismeyer and seconded by enough people, so thanks for that. I spent 45 minutes trying to figure out how to do this as like a VTuber because I thought that would be funny, but it would have been either too expensive, too time-consuming, or too both for a one-off gag I would never use again. Sorry. Every year I like to check out lists of all of the top international films that I didn't see from the previous year, particularly Asian releases. I google best Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese, etc. cinema of the year and then see what I can actually get my hands on. Oftentimes there's one or two films on the list that I've seen, a few more that I've heard of, and many more that I was completely unaware of. And that's exciting, you know, especially when it turns out that they're on some streaming service that I already subscribe to. Or, even better, that there's an IMAX screening of Cinema Escapists' number two Japanese movie of 2021 two weeks from now and it's not excluded from A-list so it's basically free. Like, you expect me to turn this down? Absolutely not. And because I was going, I looked no further into it. I entered the theater knowing just two things, its place on that top 10 list and the fact that it was animated. I wasn't prepared, but I was delighted. Bell's effectively two different movies, a metaverse take on the classic story of Beauty and the Beast and a school drama that deals with the traumatic consequences of losing a parent at a young age, as well as generally trying to navigate both a physical and virtual social life. This metaverse is called You, as in the letter. It has five billion active users who put in a pair of special earbuds that sync to their body and maybe take over the body to transport them into this other world, but maybe it's actually being viewed through a computer monitor or a phone. TBH, I'm not sure Studio Chizu really made rules for all of this, let alone tried adhering to them. I'm also confused about what You is like experientially. When our protagonist Suzu first enters in the form of the titular Bell, she finds a world full of wacky character avatars just sort of floating around between enormous buildings that appear to be uninhabited. We eventually learn that it features virtual concerts and the ability to engage in combat and experience all sorts of gorgeous unrealistic environments, but the vast majority of what we see folks doing looks pretty ******* boring. Though most of what people do in the real world is pretty ******* boring, so maybe they're trying to say something there. In any case, Bell brings color into it. She arrives on the scene and immediately starts singing this beautiful, slickly produced track. Unlike Beauty and the Beast, though, this is not a musical in a theatrical sense. Bell is literally singing in-universe, and she's the only one to do so. But like, what singing she does. The instant I got out of the theater, I checked her out on Spotify and saw that those songs have millions of plays already because of course they do, and then I spent the next several hours listening to them. And then you add to that the absolutely sumptuous sights and you have got an audiovisual feast going on. In the real world, it is generally hand-drawn to the animation on near-photorealistic painted backgrounds, but in You, they add a third dimension. And I know that there's some, like, controversy about the use of 3D in anime, but that's dumb and also it fits here from a narrative perspective and offers the animators the opportunity to do more cool ----. At the beginning of the film, which is kind of a flash-forward, we see Bell atop a giant whale covered in speakers, floating through the air with flowers and particles shooting off in all directions. Seen on literally one of the biggest screens in the world, it was just phenomenal. And that experience overrode virtually every one of my issues with the narrative itself, which was fantastic because I had a few. Beauty and the Beast is great in part because of how streamlined it is. At a svelte 84 minutes, it tells a straightforward story and does it really tightly and well. The live-action version is deservedly maligned for a whole bunch of reasons, but adding nearly an hour to the runtime is definitely among its more egregious sins. At 121 minutes, Bell is on the longer side, but it does have those two different sets of narratives that it has to tell and there are just so many things that it wants to talk about that those two hours honestly don't feel like enough to get it all in there. Like, you've got the whole metaverse thing, which updates the Beauty and the Beast story to give its title characters online fans and haters to talk and gossip about them, and how that takes a toll. Suzu's just a regular girl and she has a lot of trouble being Bell, this digital sensation that many people love and others cannot stand. She sees all of that and, like all of us online folks do, internalizes the criticism and ignores the admiration. The film considers the dangers of online stardom and how toxic fan culture can be, how anonymity can be weaponized, but also how important it can be as a way to express your true self. In you, being unveiled literally means death. Your avatar is publicly destroyed, for a moment the rest of the digital universe can see who you really are, and then you're removed from it entirely. And that's a lot on its own. But you've still got Suzu the regular person in her whole life. The death of her mother years before destroyed her relationship with her father and alienated her from all but one or two of her peers. She still hasn't figured out how to really navigate the world and now she has this metaverse. Now there is the beast, the dragon, an ultra-powerful monster whose cape is covered in bruises because in you pain is literally worn on your sleeve. He interrupts one of her virtual performances in front of all these adoring fans and after she finishes reeling from the experience she needs to know more about him. She is not his captive, in fact she pursues him, and not romantically, but eventually in hopes that she can help him. He has become a true pariah in you, the system's guards want to find and destroy him while she wants to save him. It's a nice spin on things, though it leads to some dark places as his true identity is revealed, and that's like really a lot. It just feels overstuffed, you know, like the movie really doesn't need a several minute sequence where two kids who have nothing to do with the main or even secondary plot awkwardly tell each other that they like each other. But that sequence is super funny, so I'm glad it's there anyway. Like it's bad for pacing, but it's a good time. And that's sort of Belle in a nutshell, a long string of scenes that mostly nail what they're trying to do, even if they don't always cohere in the big picture. But when it looks and sounds this good, that's enough. 8.4 out of 10. Thank you so much for watching, thank you particularly to my patrons, my mom, Hammerian Marco, Kat Saricotta, Benjamin Schiff, Anthony Cole, Magnolia Denton, Elliot Fowler, Greg Lucena, Kojo, Phil Bates, Willow, Iamthesword, Riley Zimmerman, Claire Bear, Taylor Lindese, and the folks who'd rather be read than said. If you like this video, that's great, if not, oh well. If you want to see more, uh, it is suggested in the comments for what I'll do in three days.