THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT
In the virtual world of U, built like a social network, the avatar of a mysterious singer nicknamed Belle arouses the enthusiasm of millions of users. Under this assumed identity is in fact hiding a shy high school student, Suzu, who has trouble overcoming her anxiety and asserting herself in real life. On U, Belle meets a dark character, The Beast, reclusive in a dilapidated pixel castle and considered by the whole network to be an outcast. Suzu will therefore constantly discover who is behind him.
Mamoru Hosoda’s latest feature film (Summer wars, The Boy and the Beast), a leading figure in contemporary Japanese animation, consists of an update in the era of social networks, of the famous tale The beauty and the Beast (1756), by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, an inexhaustible source of children’s films. With a considerable budget, this new film marks a production leap for the 54-year-old animator, whose main stake is to represent the extent and the profusion of the digital ocean, structured here like a rack of giant hard disk where the most fantastic avatars float like so many marine species.
Obvious lack of imagination
As he had already demonstrated in Miraï, my little sister (2018), Hosoda is a dualist filmmaker, for whom reality and imagination are opposed without ever meeting. In Beautiful, this opposition is repeated, this time, between the discreet daily life of the teenager and her flamboyant existence on the networks. Unfortunately, if Hosoda’s sensitivity is more inclined towards the representation of everyday life, for which he favors a splendid traditional 2D animation, it fails on the other hand to give the slightest consistency to the virtual world, characterized by an overflow of forms of a great ugliness, weighted down by a desire to overload and a poorly integrated use of digital technology.
The scenes taking place in U also manifest a patent lack of imagination, an inability to represent digital ubiquity and vertigo. Basically, we feel that Hosoda is an impeded realist, in particular by his ambition to speak to the young “digital” generation in a language and in codes that he does not necessarily master.