Ani-Me #23: The Ambitious, Half-Threaded Needles of BELLE (Patreon)

So Landon and I went to see an ANIME in the THEATER like a couple of NERDS.

It was yet another big milestone of this grand Ani-Me experiment, which has probably probably been my favorite writing / cinematic experience about the last few years? (Note: I’m still getting through FMA Brotherhood, there's just a ton of episodes and I’m taking a lot of notes). But I was downright excited to be going to see BELLE in theaters, particularly because Mamoru Hosoda has become my favorite director that this series has covered. That early watch of Summer Wars is still one of the most electric viewing experiences I’ve had to date; something that both feels outright foundational to my enthusiasm and also best captures the spirit of his work. For it really captures the feeling that a film can truly go anywhere. Even a film like Mirai, which begins with a visit from a future version of his new baby sister in order to establish a bond, ends up even going deeper to the layers of family history that are still impacting them all to this day (in that way, it’s a film that’s kind of about the dawn of moral consciousness and seeing your family as people). But within all his films, there are these seemingly disparate elements that get pulled together into one big story. Which is actually really hard to do! It requires all these incredibly difficult and economical story moves that are the proverbial “threading of needles.” And it’s like Hosoda has somehow always pulled it off through sheer force of will. It’s less like an invisible sleight of hand and more like Katamari Damacy. We’re all just getting curled up into a giant ball as he pulls everything into his grand, inescapable emotional orbit.

His latest entry, BELLE, has all the same ambition, but it feels like the first time that everything isn’t quite sticking together. There’s even this certain point near the end where I was bouncing between these different scenes and instead of being moved I was just like “wow, this film is trying to tackle A LOT, huh?” The elements here feel more disparate or alternatively clunked together. Particularly when you look at the six central elements of Suzu’s story, which are: 1) the notion of breaking out and finding your own voice 2) the perils of internet fame 3) socialization and boy trouble 4) the ethos of how important it is to help random people you don’t know 5) the core of traumatic loss and 6) learning to open up and express grief with the people you went through that loss with AKA her dad… Yeah, it’s a lot. But I don't think what Hosoda was aiming for was necessarily impossible. It’s the range of a young person’s life so you really can tell a story with all these elements. But there’s something about the portrayal of each of these elements that makes them each feel “half-threaded.” Which in turn helps prevent it from really gelling together into the gravity ball by the films end. So let’s go step by step…

Finding Your Voice - Hosoda has long been interested in the power of transformation, particularly when it comes to the internet. There are many seeming reasons for this. Like, as far as I know, pretty open about his furry curiosity / dabbling / support. But moreover there’s this powerful focus on a characters’ shyness and hesitance in real life interaction, but this joyful embrace of online life. So where so many of us have come to see the internet as this jaded part of everyday life, I think there’s this interesting way that Hosoda (who is in his mid 50s) still sees  the internet in this very 90s / early 2000s way because it’s all about this revelatory escape. I mean, I think there’s a reason that Suzu’s transformation into BELLE is so immediate and it’s because there is this kind of instantaneous release for her. But the problem with this musical story element is kind of two-fold.

The first is that any film about a “secondary art,” gets into this really tricky problem where if people are going to be experiencing that secondary art in narrative, then the art has to be seen the same way by the audience AND by the people on screen. It’s the STUDIO 60 problem in that you had all these characters talking about how they were making THE BEST and FUNNIEST show and their work was ACTUALLY IMPORTANT for SOCIETY… but the sketches were truly god awful. Like by every conceivable metric of humor. And this created this automatic sense of disconnect with the audience (which is why 30 Rock always implied their sketch show was pretty terrible and haphazard, which is more in the spirit of The Muppet Show). To compare, I’m not sure how the music of this film hit you, but for what was supposed to be the greatest and most moving music in all the online world I thought Belle’s music was… nice? I dunno. I feel like the portrayal of great musicians on screen needs to find at least one important earworm that sticks with you the same way that so many great original songs or scores do (think Once, where I walked out and bought the album immediately after seeing the film. Same goes for Inside Llewyn Davis). And it’s not just a stylistic thing. There are so many Animes I’ve watched where those songs feel like a fundamental refrain in my head. But BELLE for being a film about music, just more feels like it *has* a lot about music in it.

Normally this feels like it would be more of an issue, but the truth is that Hosoda isn’t so much interested in chronicling the difficult journey of creating music, nor even finding your voice, but more the anxieties an artist deals with internally. Particularly in how they ultimately transform back to self and the seeming synthesis therein. To that, Suzu’s ultimate “unveiling” of herself is beautifully-realized, but the problem is that I still can’t exactly connect it to the central internal problem or a relationship that goes along with her self-actualization. Instead, it just feels like it’s just a small part of the film’s many spinning plates. Probably because the pop star element is more about the generalized anxieties of dealing with…

Internet Fame - What’s this?! A film about the joys and perils of putting stuff on the internet while inelegantly resting behind an anonymous avatar? Interesting, you say! I don’t imagine how I could ever relate! No seriously, there were moments in this film that genuinely gave me an existential crisis. I don’t talk about it too much, mostly because it feels navel-gaze-y, but I constantly wrestle with the hows and whys of all this stuff. There’s inherent immorality / morality to it and I dwell constantly on the ways I think I’ve handled it both responsibly and completely irresponsibly. I dunno. It’s hard to explain. One day you start a novelty twitter account on a whim and 12 years later you’re writing this sentence right now. But the thing that Hosoda taps into is the emotional core that powers the sense of safety and control in creation (even if with illusory barriers), but it’s sort of strange how little her online life is about connecting with those who talk about the world in the same way she does? I dunno. That part feels like a foundational part of the connection.

But Hosoda’s take on the internet is, like I said above, weirdly out of sync with modern times. While the doxxing plot plays into some really interesting ideas about the internet kind of being an unmodded police-less force, the arc with demonizing the main police dude is… a little weird? Like, I really don’t know what to take from it or get into what I think Hosoda is saying about justice or whether this feels like a shot at “woke mobs.” But once again, I don’t think he really cares about it that much. Because the “unveiling” stuff feels like it’s more about creating stakes and leading to eventual self-realization (which is the more successful version of it). So it’s just another half-threaded needle about empowerment, though it really wants to connect this element to the other aspects of Suzu’s life. Things like…

Socialization / Boy Trouble - There’s some things that Hosoda is just so damn good at. For instance, there’s the static shot in the train station with the kids’ three-way social embarrassment that had the whole audience dying with laughter. It’s also this kind of teenage awkwardness that provided the backbone of Summer Wars and made it so damn entertaining start to finish. But there’s also a lot of the thoughtful, introspective moments between the characters of BELLE that felt reminiscent of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (particularly the wide shots of characters opening up by the rivers). But the thing about the relationships in all those films is that they are so effective precisely because they are the backbone of the story being told. But the eventual backbone of Belle is actually another matter altogether.

Namely, the mysterious “dragon” who is our proverbial Beast in this rather loose retelling of Beauty and the Beast. Now, what’s ultimately really interesting is that in every other narrative you’ve ever seen like this, the mysterious person you are trying to find online is usually a person you already know. That’s because it’s always used as a metaphor about the sides of ourselves we present in different relationships. But here? Hosoda shoots for the moon and really has it be a random person out there in the world. Which is… inherently kind of dramatically inert, but Hosoda is really trying to make a point here. Because, ultimately, the crux of the film is about another matter altogether…

Caring For Randos - First off, I’m going to say that I fully get why Hosoda is interested in this subject. We live in a giant, sprawling world and every day the internet can make us aware of the ten million horrible things that are happening all at once. It’s so easy to get overwhelmed. It’s so easy to be bludgeoned numb. It’s so easy to sit back and pull away and try to tend our own personal gardens. But Hosoda is trying to get us to reach for that… which isn’t easy. But at its core, there’s such a humanist instinct to what Hosoda is aiming for. Because it is presenting a very direct ethical argument of how we need to care for other people, often against our own self-interests… there’s just a lot of problems with both the context and execution.

For one, I have no idea what to think about a film coming out in our year of the lord twenty twenty two that advocates for not just the humanization / soul-saving of an abusive troll that is making your life a living hell. The problem is that we know the arc of this narrative already. We know that so much internet cruelty is more born of privilege, boredom, and other taught forms of toxic hate. We know the role that everyday, awful sexism plays. We know about the problems of trying to “fix” damaged, abusive people. And most importantly to this film, we know the “rough life at home” narrative is invariably more complicated, especially when it comes to understanding what propagates cycles of abuse (and especially with what stops them). This is an incredibly important subject matter and, yes, delicate topic that requires a shit load of nuance and therapeutic understanding. ESPECIALLY if you are going to dive headlong into the topic of parental abuse… And this film? Well…

On one level, Hosoda seems to understand the pain of having parental abuse be ignored by society. The moment where the real-life teenage dragon breaks down to the camera about having his pleas be ignored is one of the film's bigger moments of both emotional coherence and effect. But everything else about it feels… off? I mean, I can’t speak for Hosoda or the way the culture of abuse is dealt with in Japan, but it all feels so reductive from what I’ve witnessed? I really don’t know. Especially because of the story’s “random person” conceit, I feel like we don’t really get the right amount of time to contextualize and understand a lot of what the Beast’s story even is and therefore needs (for instance, imagine if this film was a two-hander). It’s all so reduced to the abuse itself, along with Suzu’s own reaching.

Speaking of which, the other problem is that the story of Suzu standing up for him has to double for the story of her own growth. And you can feel the way it taps into the other things going on, with finding her voice and bravery, along with the courage of her final “unveiling.” But it doesn’t snap the core into focus with powerful aplomb. Even though I get the LOGIC of why it totally should. But it’s not emotionally hitting in the same way. Which is kind of amazing given the fact that the film is trying to connect it to something pretty powerful in Suzu’s own story…

Loss - So early on in the film Suzu hears someone dismissing an event as “something that happened a long time ago” and the pain of that notion quickly reminds of there are kinds of pain that never go away. Namely it shows us the sequence of her mother’s death and I thought to myself: “oh this film is going to destroy me, isn’t it?” Not just because it is such a devastatingly sad moment, but because it is the core of everything about Suzu. The existential question of whether it was worth it for her mother to sacrifice her life for a random person instead of having a life with her is a question that’s not only impossible to answer, but seemingly impossible to heal. Which is why that hurt is at the center of her instinct to “not risk anything at all.” At least we think. Because the choice that feels so odd about this story-element is that it really ends up getting backgrounded pretty hard in the story, all before coming back for the final thrust of her going off to risk herself for another seemingly random person… I get the instinct to hide it so that it can feel like something that comes back with resonance, but there’s actually a moment of catharsis right in the midst of that which taps into what I think is the central problem of how this crucial part of the story was integrated into the overall narrative. And it has to do with…

Her Dad - So the very first moment “The Dragon” is introduced they make a statement about how this person likely feels pain / loss and there was an internal question that hit me square on: “are… are they going to make The Beast her dad!?!?” Then a scene later they show the portrait with the lady with the smashed face in his castle and I thought the same exact thing. In fact, it all went on there was all this more connective tissue with the idea, particularly as they kept laying out all these red herrings and then cut back and forth and between her interactions with The Dragon and the silence of the non-communication with her father in real life. Now, it’s actually a pretty audacious and thoughtful notion of how to re-adapt the classic Beauty and the Beast story. Something that would shift the narrative away from toxic codependent forms of love and instead examine the problems with parental relationships in such a more thoughtful and weirdly appropriate manner, particularly the unspoken traumas that bind family.

When you sit with it, it’s really not that much of a radical thought at all. In fact, just because the movie doesn’t actually reveal him as the beast doesn’t mean it’s NOT about trying to be that exact thing. I mean, there’s a reason The Dragon’s father also lost their spouse, which causes THAT father to act out in grief. It’s the same exact idea, just a character removed. And there’s a reason the film even gives Suzu and her father a mini-arc of how they never speak and communicate and then on the train he gives the message of getting to see how brave she’s become just like her mother. It’s honestly the most cathartic part of the film.

Which gives way to the whole problem with the film, which is how much the story itself is crying out for this aspect to be given more attention. Heck, it’s crying out to be the anchor of the film. For at the core of this story is so much unspoken grief. Both Suzu and her father have a wide, cavernous wound that feels as cavernous as the emotional gulf between them. It’s a wound they need to heal together, even begging to go through this journey and make some kind of rescue together. Again, there’s a reason his words are so cathartic: their shared core is the most potent emotional connection in the entire film. But the execution of it all feels so truncated and short. The doubling up of the theme with the other father makes it feel too distant. Like they’re just a part of the many, scrambled threads the film is trying to get a hand on versus the emotional core of everything at the heart of Suzu’s trauma - which is unfortunately what needs to be healed in order to find bravery in the other aspects of her life.

Which means the whole problem with BELLE is the balance of emphasis and timing. It’s not necessarily that it's reaching for a lot of threads (after all, so much of Hosoda’s work is equally ambitious), it’s that the delicate relationship of those threads needs to be woven with more care. To mix the metaphor, the ingredients are all there, but 20% more of this or 5% less of that, etc. Particularly in the paternal relationship needs to be more of an anchor. But it’s also that the choir ladies needed to feel a bit more like a key piece of conflict so that their joining the fray feels cathartic. And then it’s about managing the expressions of insight in the film that feel slightly off, whether they be her crush’s odd wording of him “not your guardian anymore” or the film’s sudden deep-dive into her “solution” to the boy’s abuse. The thing is that these all aren’t insurmountable issues. They’re the kind of stuff we always say is just “a couple of drafts away” and can thus be smoothed out into something more functional… But this is the version we got. So, as badly as I want to be swept up by the film’s many grand ambitions, the needles all feel half-threaded, which in turn makes us feel jingled about or clinked to the ground with an unfortunate inelegance. But in a weird way, the thing that BELLE actually reinforces to me is the sudden realization of, “wow, Hosoda’s other films must have come so close to not working either, huh?” Which somehow, someway…

Only reinforces the miracle that they do.

<3HULK