Belle 2022
This movie showed up this weekend at my local AMC theater and I was excited to see it has an amazing 97% on Rotten Tomatoes and 85 on Metacritic. Numbers that high can be troublesome, but I wanted to see it anyway. It is an animated Japanese movie (afternoon shows dubbed in English which I saw, evening shows in Japanese with subtitles) about a withdrawn high school girl in Japan whose online avatar develops a worldwide following as a singer. She encounters a villain online and shows him some empathy, with a few touches taken from Beauty and the Beast, though maybe more inspired by than based on that fairy tale. I think a lot of studios want to capitalize on technology, connectiveness, and online worlds, so we have seen a lot of movies, especially animated movies, based on that lately, including Ralph Breaks the Internet, Ron’s Gone Wrong and The Mitchells vs. The Machines. It is very difficult to get this right though and for me they have all fallen short. The personal story of the girl is very good, but a lot of the stuff with the beast and especially the ending didn’t work as well for me. This movie touches a little on the underlying humanity of people online, but they still don’t quite have it. The songs are nice (translated into English, which may hurt a little, but makes them easier to enjoy) and the animated online world is pretty neat. The real world stuff was good and I liked that even as withdrawn as she is, she has some varied support if she needs it or pays attention. To me there are a lot of good ingredients, but ultimately the story doesn’t hold it all together.
Written: 14 Jan 2022