‘Belle,’ a wildly creative feast for the eyes
Yet another riff on the French fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast,” this one from Japan’s Studio Chizu (“The Girl Who Leapt Through Time”), “Belle” is known as “The Dragon and the Freckled Princess” in Japan.
The film’s freckled princess is Suzu Naito (Kaho Nakamura), a 17-year-old student who watched her beloved mother drown while rescuing another child from a raging river. The experience left the sensitive Suzu emotionally stunted, incapable of experiencing happiness and unable to sing or enjoy music, which were her passions.
Among Suzu’s friends are sportsman Kamishin (Shota Shometani), a popular girl named Ruka (Tina Tamashiro), a boy she has known since childhood named Shinobu (Ryo Narita) and Belle’s computer genius best friend Hiroka, aka Hiro (Ikura).
Suzu lives with her widowed father, who hopes she will someday emerge from her gloomy shell. They have a house in a rural region at the foot of a wooded hillside.
One day Hiro convinces Suzu to sign on to an online service dubbed U that offers its users a chance to “start over” and leave all failures and heartbreaks behind. In the hopes of doing so, Suzu creates an online alter ego, a beautiful freckled princess she names Belle. This virtual alter ego wears outlandish and gaudy outfits, including wild headgear, and makes show-stopping entrances often riding atop a sperm whale. Suzu finds she can sing again and her singing attracts millions of followers.
But whenever Belle performs in this virtual world another avatar appears, a creature dubbed the Dragon, aka the Beast, and he wreaks havoc and is relentlessly pursued by superhero figures with whom the Dragon usually wipes the floor.
The Dragon is an intimidating and powerful figure, a giant monster out of a fairy tale with fangs, claws and horns and a billowing cape.
In “Belle,” fairy tales are an articulation of human experience. How many young men can be described as princes in beast’s clothing? How many young people yearn to express their longings in song? In one sequence set in the online world of U, Belle wears a miraculous dress made of flowers that produces flower explosions, leaving a floral trail in its wake.
Suzu becomes convinced that the Dragon’s human self must be someone, perhaps a child, terribly angry and in some kind of physical danger, and she resolves with help of the resourceful Hiro to find out who it is and help that person in the real world.
Writer-director Mamoru Hosoda (“The Girl Who Leapt Through Time”), the founder of Studio Chizu, is a brilliant, visual storyteller.
“Belle” is a wildly creative feast for the eyes in the psychedelic-techno-pop tradition, mixing conventional animation and computergenerated imagery.
Visually, when “Belle” is in its virtual world setting, the film has much of the same lunatic inventiveness as the “Lego” movies. The story, when it isn’t being familiar, often verges on the sentimental, and there are way too many scenes of these young people having red-faced, tongue-tied shyness fits. But some future college student is sure to write a paper comparing Hosoda’s “Belle” to French artist Jean Cocteau’s surreal, live-action classic “La belle et la bete” (1946), and it would probably be worth reading.
(“Belle” contains violence, brief profanity, mature themes and suggestive material.)