Under Childhood is a column on children’s cinema—movies about and for kids.
Mamoru Hosoda’s Belle is an anime musical that reimagines the story of Beauty and the Beast as two teenagers whose paths cross on a virtual reality platform, where both appear as their respective online personas—one a pink-haired pop star with a stirring voice, the other a wolf-like monster covered in bruises. Surreptitious meetings between the two provide some respite from their somber physical reality. But a slew of online and offline threats circumvent the chance for a deeper bond to develop. The desire for a multidimensional friendship (one that is cultivated both online and IRL, or “in real life”) sets the film into motion. The release of Belle arrives in the middle of a rather historic moment in which many screen-mediated childhood experiences are not only more ubiquitous but also mandatory, even state-mandated. For many children, the pandemic has made being online a requirement for participation in public and private spheres, whether their families can afford the technology or not. As these environments are altered according to the conditions and limits of virtual space, so too are the ways that children socialize with one another. Through “Zoom class,” students interact with classmates through tiny icons, attempting to glean clues from blurry backgrounds about who the others might really be.
Without cynicism, Belle asserts that today’s children are born into netizenry without much choice, usually by way of their parents. Artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, algorithms and data mining are now common features of childhood, filters through which children interact with their surroundings. We’re introduced to the film's protagonist, high-schooler Suzu (Kaho Nakamura), through a flashback montage of her early years. Each formative chapter of Suzu’s life is distinguished by the use of smart technology to pursue her love of music. Her mother (Sumi Shimamoto) and father (Kōji Yakusho) teach Suzu to play the piano through an iPhone app; she eventually starts to produce her own songs through GarageBand. When her mother dies after saving a drowning girl in a lake—a news story that attracts negative attention online—Suzu is no longer able to sing, not even to herself and especially not in front of others. Concluding that she must be unlovable and burdensome, she withdraws from the world.
Through an invitation from her friend Hiro (Lilas Ikuta), Suzu installs the app for the VR platform U. The app immediately scans her body and creates an avatar, or an AS—an avatar designed by U’s technology, constructed around what the software decides are the user’s best traits. Suzu’s avatar, who she names “Bell,” shares her distinct freckles. (Frustratingly, Belle does not elaborate why users cannot manually control their appearance in U, where the possibilities for self-expression otherwise seem so robust, and how users might push back against this restriction. Nor do we really know why Suzu's Bell has a more conventional look than the silly-looking creatures around her, who hardly resemble their IRL selves in terms of shape, size, color, gender, and so on.) Immediately upon entering U, Bell bursts into song. She surprises herself as much as the users entranced by the mysterious singer who seems to have no digital footprint. They rename her “Belle” because she’s beautiful. Hosoda's Summer Wars (2009) opens with the introduction of a VR platform called Oz, which has 1 billion users. Throughout the film, Oz users face scrutiny from non-Oz users about the significance of the platform, and whether or not it’s really just a game. In fact, Oz isn’t just a game but a metaverse, occupied by everyone from businessmen to military leaders, where cubicles are next to stadiums, and stock reports loom over shopping malls. But the U of Belle is even bigger. It boasts nearly 5 billion users, and unlike Oz—where Takashi Murakami-inspired orbs are dispersed across a white background—U is an extremely crowded cubic city. (U was designed by British architect Eric Wong, whose portfolio Hosoda discovered while browsing the web.) Whereas Oz was characterized by its business, commerce, and entertainment sectors, U attracts diverse users mostly as an online hangout spot. In U you're free to do nothing, to roam without facing the bombardment of advertisements, propaganda, and explicit content.
That U users like to loiter and wait for something interesting to happen makes Belle’s virality even more instantaneous. Her sparkling image is not totally unlike that of the many “Vtubers,” or virtual YouTubers, who stream to viewers through a virtual avatar that uses face tracking to convey the streamer’s affectations, or even Aespa, the newly debuted K-pop group with virtual members that perform alongside their actual counterparts. (The marketing of Belle leans into these contemporary parallels: you can follow Belle’s somewhat uncanny Instagram account, run by Hosoda’s Studio Chizu, and listen to her music on streaming services.) Although Hiro pushes her to be more ambitious about earning money and making hits, Suzu has little aspiration to be a celebrity. She’s perfectly happy knowing that she can hear herself sing again, even if in virtual disguise. Hosoda envisions the virtual persona as a portal through which netizens can explore different sides of themselves with pleasure and the full protection of anonymity. This view resists the common strain of pessimism found in films about the internet that depict logging on as an escape away from reality rather than an entrance into an extension of reality. Two decades ago, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse (2001) (which coincidentally stars Yakusho) likened the internet to a matrix of lonely people, turned to ghosts and whisked away by a rapture. In Shunji Iwai’s All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001), an online forum provides a dangerous degree of solace for violent kids looking to numb their guilt with a tenuous sense of community among faceless entities. Though Belle doesn’t suggest that Suzu’s success in itself defeats her IRL insecurities, it presents the situation as an opportunity that might teach her to trust her own voice.
A concert for Belle in U is interrupted by the Dragon, an avatar that tears through the crowds as he is chased by U’s moderators. A family friend guesses that he’s “a bad boy.” Intrigued and intimidated by him in the way many kids form crushes on vampires, werewolves, and other monsters, Suzu becomes determined to know the Dragon’s true identity and the source of his anger. She even writes him a song to express her feelings towards him. This fluttering attachment evolves into a more platonic sympathy once Suzu discovers that the Dragon is actually a younger boy named Kenji (Takeru Satoh), who along with his brother is being abused by his father. The reveal upends the original fairytale’s controversial reputation in pop culture as a story about a violent man who coerces a beautiful woman to stay in his castle. Hosoda has cited Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991) as a major influence, and even received animator Glen Keane’s blessing to make his own version. It comes as a bit of a relief that in Belle, the Dragon is a misunderstood child and not a belligerent adult man. Suzu’s commitment to saving him is her own choice, which in turn teaches her the value of taking the risk to help someone in need.
Many VR researchers have speculated that the embodiment of a virtual avatar—and the placement of that avatar in immersive scenarios that resemble real life—can have long-term positive effects on the subject’s mind, from mitigating phobias to enhancing self-esteem. Suzu undergoes a similar shift in perspective in Belle. Suzu tries to reach out to the brothers, but Kenji doubts she’s Belle and rejects her. To prove herself, she lets go of the Belle avatar by “unveiling” herself (the U term for doxxing). She now appears as Suzu to billions of users, but she’s not the same Suzu as before. Virtually confronting her greatest fear—singing before a crowd—allows Suzu to better understand the compassion that drove her mother to put her life on the line for a stranger. After her IRL meeting with the brothers, Suzu is eager to sing again, this time among family and friends on a walk home. When asked about the film’s optimism by the Los Angeles Times, Hosoda stated: “Whenever there’s a really groundbreaking new technology or innovation, there’s a tendency to, especially from adults, interpret it in a much more negative light. [...] You can’t take the smartphones from these kids and expect them to go back to the farm and grow vegetables.” Belle encourages its viewers to take ownership of their netizenry and to consider how a healthy balance of online and IRL life can complement and enrich both. Uninhibited by any nostalgia for an ascetic past or fear of what awaits us in the trenches ahead, Hosoda focuses on empowering children to see themselves as active agents of change rather than passive vessels. (That sort of self-perception is likely easier to achieve for users of U, where corporations are fangless, cyberbullying is tame, and censorship isn't strict because there's not much to censor.) After all, Belle assures us, little pockets and corners of a better internet really do exist, held together by random acts of kindness.
