When we think about how the internet shapes our lives, especially in art, we tend to imagine the worst. From TV shows like Black Mirror and feature documentaries like The Social Dilemma, to novels like The Circle, writers and filmmakers have portrayed the digital realm as one where we indulge self-destructive and narcissistic impulses, and where our privacy and security is breached as reported by BBC.
Visualising digital world
However, as the dystopian treatments of the internet mount up, one filmmaker has been on a different mission: to showcase the beauty of online connection. In the eyes of Japanese anime director Mamoru Hosoda, the web is an ever-evolving realm of exciting potential, an attitude embodied in his aesthetic approach to visualising this digital world.
Hosoda’s optimism about our interactions with the digital world are most apparent in his latest feature Belle, which is released in the US this week. A remix of Beauty and the Beast for the digital age, it tells the story of Suzu, a teenage girl living in the Japanese countryside with her widowed father, from whom she is partly estranged because of his lingering grief, and his unspoken lack of understanding as to his child’s state of mind.
In some ways, Belle could be seen as riffing on our increasing desire to occupy fully-visualised virtual social spaces – as seen for example, with games like Fortnite and Animal Crossing: New Horizons, acting as areas for concerts or interviews, and allowing people the ability to mingle during lockdown. But it’s also much more fundamentally about the whole nature of online communication, and the way it can facilitate both personal transformation and self-reflection.
Fantasies of digital living
Hosoda’s directorial career began around the turn of the millennium, and as his filmography has grown, parenthood and the lives of children have clearly become his pet themes. His previous film, 2018’s Mirai, explores a father becoming a stay-at-home parent for the first time. Before that, 2015’s Wolf Children and 2012’s The Boy and the Beast both see single parents fear over where their children’s independence will lead them, as well as just how much influence they hold over the shape of their lives. But alongside this focus on the family, a more specific interest he has repeatedly explored has been the role that the internet plays in the development of modern-day children – it’s something he first touched upon in his very first feature film, 2000’s Digimon: The Movie and has returned to in 2009’s Summer Wars, about a high-school student getting involved in an online world called Oz, and now Belle.
Bringing the virtual connectivity of the internet to cinematic life isn’t something reserved for animation, of course. You could call it the basis of one of the most popular, influential sci-fi blockbusters in modern memory: Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s The Matrix – which, in 1999, reflected the new online world and folded together a wealth of digital culture with theories about simulation as well as video games, kung-fu movies, wuxia, and anime. Those interests are all channelled into a futuristic digital universe that looks like ours, but where computer functions are essentially the laws of nature – a system of control that the film’s rebel protagonists learn to shape. The Wachowskis evoked club culture and fetishwear in the film’s iconic costume design, an element which affirmed the idea of this virtual space as a place for reinvention. The recent sequel, The Matrix Resurrections continued this sartorial theme in a slightly different way, through the character of Morpheus (now played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and his embrace of colourful fashions. The virtual space can be oppressive, both films suggest, but once mastered, it can also be a place for exhilarating self-realisation.
More cynical cinematic takes
When it comes to films visualising the internet, 2018 blockbuster Ready Player One also leaps to mind. Based on a 2011 novel by Ernest Cline, it is set in 2045, when humans live much of their lives in a virtual world, OASIS, that its director Steven Spielberg evidently believes is dystopian, even though Cline portrayed it much more uncritically. OASIS’s aesthetic comes from being a world built on pop culture ephemera: Spielberg peppers it with cinematic references to films like The Shining and Back to the Future, as well as 3D recreations of beloved “geek culture” iconography like the bright red motorcycle from seminal cyberpunk anime Akira – digital constructions which the characters pay for, and flaunt as trophies.
However Belle takes a more romantic, immersive perspective from the start: launching the audience headfirst into one of Suzu/Bell’s virtual concerts. As she belts out the original song “U” by Japanese collective millennium parade, the scene is awash with eye-popping colour, the protagonist’s digital avatar wearing a gown of red roses while she surfs a giant whale that doubles as both stage and sound system; the flowers and sea creatures serve as immediate markers of a gentler, more organic online world than we might expect. From there, the film shows an internet genuinely reborn as a parallel communal space, geared towards the people that use it rather than those who might make money off them. As a 3D virtual social space “U” is practically the antithesis to something like Mark Zuckerberg’s newly-coined “Metaverse”, inspiring and original where the latter thus far looks ugly and commercial-focused, littered with advertising and branding. Wong puts it simply: as the film speaks of togetherness, “the city has to have that language too.” It had to feel welcoming. “I remember talking to Eric and we were saying, ‘well, if it’s really a world made up completely of skyscrapers, no one would really want to live there,'” adds Hosoda.
The depth of Belle’s vision
What’s interesting, too, is that the makeup of Belle’s creative team very much supports the internet utopianism of the film, not just because Hosoda discovered Wong online, but because of his generally “borderless” approach to sourcing key artists from around the world. Wong reflects that “that’s the beautiful thing about the internet. It could have been anyone in the world [he partnered with]. But he somehow found me.” Among the team of artists are Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart from Ireland’s Cartoon Saloon, best known for Oscar-winning hit Wolfwalkers, who contributed artwork to a moment where Bell steps outside of the main urban cityscape of U. Paired with Bell’s floral costumes, the incorporation of the pair’s flattened drawing style, in keeping with the 2D used for the film’s vision of the real world and full of organic shapes, further emphasises Belle’s conception of the internet as a natural extension of our world, rather than a rival to it.
Meanwhile that sense of joyous diversity underpinning Belle is also reflected in the character designs in the world of U, the peculiarity and variety of which rival even classic Studio Ghibli films like Spirited Away, with a wild host of weird little online avatars. According to Hosoda, “[for] most of them, a number of different designers designed them. And then we would pick the best one”. He elaborates that “the reason that I wanted all the designers to be involved in designing the avatars is to get the diversity that you would have in the world of U.”
It’s an idea that can be spotted in the very light source of U – its peculiar, gigantic crescent moon, which both Hosoda and Wong highlight as their favourite visual element of the world because, as Wong says, “it’s the light that represents everyone, it belongs to everyone”. It’s a stirring vision of our digital future – one that we can only hope turns out to be half as compassionate, inclusive and beautiful as Belle imagines.
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Source: BBC
