Belle (2021)

 

Japanese director / animator Mamoru Hosoda's lavish Belle (2021) is the umpteeth retelling / recasting of the Beauty and the Beast fairytale, set both in an enormous virtual world called "U", over which a beautful singing avatar named Belle rules, and in actual southern Japan, where a withdrawn high school student named Suzu seems to be losing the struggle with adapting to her mother's death years before. How these two worlds rise and converge is the gist of the story, whose pacing is more deliberate than game-based anime but which succeeds with a thoughtful storyline and characters that have more dimensions than one might expect in an animated feature. I regret the dubbed version of the film and not the original Japanese with subtitles was screened at my showing. I prefer seeing and hearing the product as the director had intended.