A high-tech anime riff on Beauty and the Beast set between the virtual and the real, the shimmering new film from Oscar-nominated Japanese director Mamoru Hosoda (Mirai; Wolf Children) is a fable for the era of augmented reality; a study in the digital performance of self that doubles as a pretty neat pop star fantasia.
Belle takes its audience inside an immersive virtual world known as U, where some 5 billion people log in with fantasy avatars generated by a unique app that biometrically syncs to the user – channelling their innermost selves through an uncanny synthesis of the physical and the digital.
As science fiction, it's barely a stretch from the online present, where augmented reality, custom avatars and identity-scrambling filters have become a part of daily interaction.
Back in old-fashioned, real-world Japan, mousy country teenager Suzu (voiced by Kaho Nakamura) is a high-school wallflower haunted by the loss of her mother at a young age, an event that put an end to her childhood dreams of playing music and caused her to become melancholy and withdrawn.
Encouraged by her best friend-turned-musical svengali Hiroka (Lilas Ikuta), Suzu logs in to U and creates an avatar who becomes Belle – an impossibly radiant, pink-haired cyber-princess who extracts Suzu's latent musical gifts and blows them up to pop superstar dimensions.
Designed by veteran Disney character animator Jin Kim, whose work includes Tangled, the Frozen films and the recent Encanto, Belle combines the look of those films' wide-eyed princesses with their anime counterparts, her traditionally drawn features rendered – like much of Hosoda's movie – in a fluid blend of 2D and computer animation.
Unlike the more sinister visions of humanity's online immersion popularised in movies like The Matrix, Hosoda's take on the virtual realm has always been ambivalent – even optimistic – about the technology's potential power to augment and transform the user's real-world self.
For a filmmaker who began his feature career with the virtual menagerie of Digimon: The Movie (2000), and whose Summer Wars (2009) explored the concept of an immersive online world, his U-niverse in Belle feels like the natural extension of so many of his artistic concerns.
It's a world teeming with possibility and imagination, with spectacular digital architecture (created in collaboration with British designer Eric Wong), wackadoo critters, and a heaving, shapeshifting super-city swirling with all manner of strange life (the background world was developed with Oscar-nominated Wolfwalkers directors Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart).
Any film featuring a blue whale loaded up with subwoofers that cruises across a city skyline can already lay claim to the year's most memorable imagery.
Hardwired with Suzu's instinctive talent for music, Belle becomes an instant smash in this virtual world, performing for immense crowds while her real-world identity – like those of Hannah Montana or Jem before her – remains a secret.
During one of Belle's virtual concerts, the stadium is crashed by a horned, menacing creature known as the Dragon (Takeru Satoh), who comes straight from the dark id of anime monsterdom.
To the superhero-like, self-appointed moral guardians patrolling U, who have the power to unmask users' real-life identities, the Dragon is a disruptive bully to be driven into exile; to Belle, who is drawn to the beast's pain and sadness, he's an enigma with whom she becomes obsessed.
No, it's not a story about Grimes and her ex, Elon Musk.
Hosoda was nominated for an Oscar for Mirai, but is arguably best-known – or at least most-loved – for his 2012 animation Wolf Children, a tale of the enduring bond between humans and fantastical creatures that was moving for its stark sense of empathy and loss.
With Belle, he lets the classic French fairytale – via the obligatory filmic nods to Cocteau and Disney – unleash his imagination with dazzling results, finding the story's soul in breathtaking set pieces in the Dragon's virtual castle in the sky.
Yet Hosoda, usually so attuned to emotions of the domestic, isn't as successful with the real-world sequences, which he occasionally struggles to fuse with the virtual action.
The IRL search to uncover the real Dragon – a quest that wends its way through various suspects, from celebrity nutballs to Suzu's high-school peers – doesn't have the same kick as its online analog, while a late-film excursion into family trauma is ambitious but underdeveloped.
But the film understands how hard it can be for many, especially those living with trauma, to form genuine connections with others in the real world, and the potential of fantasy to break through anxiety and fear.
Being 'true to yourself' is more complicated in Belle than the usual rote message of empowerment offered by other movies aimed at younger audiences; here, one's self is inseparably real and virtual, a symbiosis that embraces the direction human life is headed, for better or worse – and one that Hosoda elects to frame with optimism.
In a time where so many of Hollywood's notions of the future tend to be unrelentingly pessimistic or mired in solipsism – where technology and digital immersion inevitably spell the collapse of civilisation – Belle represents a hopeful, progressive vision that dares to imagine alternate possibilities.
Belle is in cinemas now.
