belle and the beast movie review

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Mamoru Hosoda’s Beauty and the Beast riff Belle argues for optimism about the internet

In this maximalist anime movie, a tale as old as time uploads to virtual reality

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This review was originally published in conjunction with Belle ’s theatrical debut in American release. It has been updated and republished for the film’s digital and streaming release.

The kid-friendly moral of Beauty and the Beast (or at least the 1991 Disney version) is a simple one: “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” With the ambitious, decisively uncynical new anime movie Belle , writer-director Mamoru Hosoda adds to a long list of adaptations by updating the story for the internet age. Carefully fabricated online personas replace magical curses, and enchanted singing candlesticks transform into mewling AIs. But the director of Mirai and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time pushes the core message one step further by emphasizing how connection is a two-way street. It isn’t enough to recognize someone else’s true self without offering vulnerability in return. Produced by Hosoda’s Studio Chizu, this lush, spectacularly animated vision argues for the life-changing bonds that can develop when people shed their digital defenses.

Belle takes place in a near-future where a virtual-reality platform called U dominates the global consciousness. Singer Kaho Nakamura stars as Suzu, a shy provincial teen still grieving the death of her mother, who drowned rescuing a child from a flooding river. Suzu and her mom shared a love of music, and since the traumatic incident, Suzu has panic attacks when she tries to sing. She only regains confidence and her voice when she enters U as an avatar named Belle. With the help of her mischievous hacker friend Hiro (Lilas Ikuta), she inadvertently becomes a viral pop idol in the process.

For Suzu, U’s appeal is its capacity for reinvention — the virtual world promises escapism in the form of anonymity. (The platform’s ultimate punishment for wrongdoing is “Unveiling,” where an avatar is stripped away and the user behind it is exposed to the world.) When a misbehaving user known as the Dragon (Takeru Satoh) crashes one of Belle’s concerts, pursued by a group of warriors determined to Unveil him, Belle sets out to discover his secret.

The story of a shy girl finding her voice sounds predictable, but Belle takes the idea into surreal territory. This is a film that features a floating pop diva shedding crystals from atop a neon whale covered with speakers . The animation serves up a vivid feast for the eyes throughout, and a seamless integration of styles deepens Belle ’s world-building. Glossy 3D CG animates U, while the real world is illustrated in Hosoda’s familiar traditional style.

Designed by renowned Disney animator Jin Kim, Belle resembles the studio’s quintessential princess, with a waifish face and impossibly big blue eyes. Suzu, on the other hand, looks like a typical cartoonish anime heroine, signaling the tension between her online and real selves. The Dragon cuts a twisted figure. A selling feature of U is its use of biometric data to link users’ actual bodies with their digital avatars, and the bruises tied to his real-life counterpart bloom across his hunched back like neon fungi.

Belle’s concerts explode in a smorgasbord of color and spectacle, but when the music switches off, U feels limitless but lonely. Designed by London architect Eric Wong, the omni-directional city lives in a near-perpetual twilight. Expansive Inception -style stacked buildings overwhelm the screen, but all their yellow windows are vacant. Adding to U’s amalgamation of ideas, Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon ( Wolfwalkers ) contributed background work to the storybook-esque lands surrounding the Dragon’s crumbling castle.

Many of the castle’s details are drawn with white outlines, making the glitchy building look like it’ll flicker out of existence any second. The virtual platform is a fascinating curiosity in Belle , although it’s never made clear how non-viral stars spend their time in U, or how one control-obsessed vigilante hijacked the creators’ powers to expose users’ identities. Perhaps intentionally, though, the real world offers a more compelling place to stay. Lingering shots of the natural world and a warm array of details, like the faded inspirational Post-It notes on Suzu’s wall, or her three-legged dog, all make Suzu’s life feel lived-in.

And Suzu is struggling through that life. Her name means “bell” in English, but as her mom’s old choir points out, she’s more like a bell cricket hiding in the shadows. She struggles to relate to her dad and classmates. The latter emotional distance gets rendered physically by the long bus and train journey Suzu makes every day to get to school. She’s surrounded by empty chairs the whole journey. Loneliness is part of her routine. Hosoda makes this consideration of space explicit, with frequent wide shots of Suzu walking home alone. Similarly, as Suzu recalls her mother’s death, the young girl her mom rescues first appears in another wide shot against total blackness. Highlighting the girl’s isolation sets up parallels between Suzu’s decision to help the Dragon with her mom’s own choice.

Such shot compositions could start to feel on the nose, but Hosoda offers a point of contrast by using the same technique to emphasize closeness. Washed in fuzzy brushstrokes, Suzu’s memory with her childhood protector Shinibou (Ryō Narita) shows the pair clustered together, surrounded by soft yellow. When Belle later bonds with the Dragon during a dance homage to the Disney film, the pair flow up together against an expanse of empty sky. The two moments have completely opposite color palettes, getting at the idea that these attachments can form both offline and on.

Hosoda’s work often considers what it means to exist in two different spaces, by playing with separate timelines and realities. Even his film Wolf Children intertwined this theme by considering the dual identities of its werewolf leads. With near-identical opening sequences, Belle ’s premise feels like the updated version of Hosoda’s Summer Wars , another virtual-reality story that warns against over-integrating technology through an apocalyptic scenario. In Belle , though, the stakes are much more intimate and grounded in character growth. The fate of the universe doesn’t rest on Suzu’s shoulders; all that matters is whether she can get through to one person who needs help. The film’s climax hinges on her reconciling the disconnect between her two selves to be able to truly open up.

The idea that people online only advertise the parts of themselves they want others to see isn’t novel. Neither is the revelation that anonymity breeds spite. At times, Belle ’s depiction of online judgment via overlapping dialogue and chat bubbles feels trite. Hosoda knows better than to attribute all our worst instincts solely to the internet, though. One of the film’s most inventive sequences shows Suzu quelling vicious school gossip through targeted responses, which Hosada visualizes as if she’s conquering countries in a Risk -esque hexagonal game board. The message is clear: Rumors travel whatever way they can. “The world is the same everywhere,” Suzu sighs.

Hosoda also grounds the eventual reveals about the Dragon in real life, which leads to an abrupt final-act tonal shift that he doesn’t quite pull off. What seems intended as a message of courage comes out as a misguided statement about conquering impossible situations through resilience. Given the delicate subject matter, the story ends on an unsettling note.

Still, the core of the movie is about empathy, and Hosoda’s sentimentality is compelling, even at its most overstated and earnest. Belle doesn’t shy away from online toxicity, but it advocates for a hopeful perspective on the ways the internet can connect people in meaningful, supportive ways. Hosoda deeply wants to believe that online interactions can be used for good. Because if not, what else could all this relentless online misery possibly be for?

Belle is now available for digital rental on platforms like Amazon , Vudu , and others.

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‘Belle’ Review: A Feminist Beauty and the Beast Fable for the Digital Era

Anime master Mamoru Hosoda imagines another forward-thinking virtual world, “U,” using it as the backdrop for an empowering musical fairy-tale.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

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With “ Belle ,” anime master Mamoru Hosoda has reimagined “Beauty and the Beast” for the metaverse set — that young generation of social media users who switch identities comfortably between the physical world and a more inviting online one.

Roughly half the movie takes place in the “real world” (which is to say, a traditional cartoon rendering of modern-day Japan, where hand-drawn teenagers worry about who’s popular at school and how to get noticed by the classmates they find cute), while the fairy-tale portion is set on an ultra-popular virtual platform called “U,” where the main character appears as a slender pink Disney princess type: Belle.

In U, members assume an alternate identity/avatar (or “AS”) that allows them to more fully express certain dimensions of their personalities. Here, Hosoda appears to have tapped into a central anxiety of modern adolescence: the concern that others could never truly know or accept all of one’s nuances and contradictions, just as in nearly every telling of this classic story, only Belle can see the goodness in the Beast.

For more than 20 years, Hosoda has been refining a vision of the way that virtual realms extend, enhance and complicate modern life — from the Digital Realm depicted in his two “Digimon Adventure” movies to the stark white Oz of “Summer Wars.” Visually complex as those iterations were, nothing compares to U, as Hosoda packs an Imax-worthy level of detail into his depiction of a vast parallel world/playground, which looks like a cross between a noir-and-neon “Matrix”-like megacity and a dust mote’s view of a PC motherboard, where chips loom like skyscrapers in the background.

Populated by some 5 billion registered users, U promises that once people have plugged into their devices, pesky restrictions such as gravity need not apply, and everyone is free to be themselves. (Fine, but what do people actually do in U? The concept suggests more questions than it can answer, relying on a “don’t ask, just go with it” style of storytelling.)

Before joining U, Suzu is a relatively introverted high school student. Much is made of the fact she has freckles, which become a defining aspect of her AS — a row of bright fuchsia triangles imprinted across her cheeks, like some kind of trend-setting makeup. Shy and emotionally scarred from the loss of her mother several years earlier, Suzu lives way out in the sticks, far from her classmates, and spends much of her time alone or else fumbling awkwardly around the few friends she has at school (which include computer-whiz Hiroka and protective male comrade Shinobu). Flashbacks show her making music with her mother, though even the thought of singing makes her physically ill these days — which is one of the many liberating aspects of this new technology for Suzu.

From the moment she arrives in U, she’s able to express herself through song. “Belle” isn’t a musical in the traditional sense, although Hosoda gives the character multiple opportunities to belt out ethereal emotional anthems, casting Japanese singer-songwriter Kaho Nakamura to handle both speaking and performing aspects of the role. (For the English dub, virtual unknown Kylie McNeill proves just as stunning — especially considering the gifted vocalist has fewer than 500 Instagram followers at the moment.) Hosoda wanted a fresh, unique sound, and though Belle eventually becomes the most popular personality in U, her virtual peers don’t know what to make of her inaugural performance, sniping from the sidelines. “I can’t stand show-offs,” grouses one. “She’s not ugly, but…” huffs another.

As with many a viral sensation before her, it takes time for people to discover Belle’s talents, and once they do, the messaging is mixed. Some adore her, others are downright jealous or cruel, but practically everyone wants to know who her true identity: the real you behind the U front. Remember, Suzu can’t even bring herself to sing karaoke, but through Belle, she’s able to unleash the voice that’s been bottled up insider her. And just as Belle is about to give her first massive arena concert, the show is interrupted by the arrival of the Beast, an aggressive, wolf-headed character who represents the bad-boy antithesis to Belle’s delicate pop princess (whose Disney-esque look was designed and overseen by Jin Kim, a veteran of the American animation studio).

In U, the Beast easily manages to terrorize everyone — everyone except for Belle, who responds with curiosity and compassion. Oddly enough, the Beast seems to be the only user who dares misbehave in this environment, which, if it were anything like Facebook or Fortnite, would be a lot more familiar with people acting out behind the shield of anonymity. No matter. Together with best friend Hiroka, Belle determines to identify who this seemingly misunderstood rebel really is. Storywise, it probably would’ve been more efficient for the Beast simply to have kidnapped Belle as he tries to make his escape (at least that way, the two characters would’ve been forced together early), but Hosoda seems committed to making Suzu a strong, proactive protagonist, leading the movie on a long tangent full of dead ends and red herrings as she and Hiroka go about their investigation.

“Belle” works best when our attention is on its title character, less so when the story shifts back to Suzu. The most iconic scene occurs midway through, when Belle finds and embraces her beast, singing “Lend Me Your Voice” as he temporarily drops the tough-guy act in her presence. But there’s still another hour to navigate, as Suzu and company gather around computer monitors, zooming in on details (like a glimpse of Belle reflected in the eyeball of a kid they hear humming that private song) and trying to untangle a puzzle that becomes less and less interesting as the source of the Beast’s temper comes into focus.

Hosoda has created an infinite-possibility universe in which to set this tale, and the at times convoluted story can’t help feeling limiting as our imaginations tease all the stuff being ignored in U’s more intriguing corners. Still, there’s something undeniably empowering in the way U (and by extension Hosoda) recognizes the inner strengths in people who themselves don’t fully understand what they’re capable of. Belle’s big moment — when she risks being “unveiled” (having her identity revealed) in order to reconnect with whoever’s hiding behind the Beast’s monstrous AS — feels like a scene destined for anime history. In a sense, movies aren’t so different from the virtual worlds a platform like U offers, and this one promises a special kind of escapism while going out of its way to keep it real.

Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival, July 12, 2021. (Also in Animation Is Film Festival.) MPAA Rating: PG. Running time: 121 MIN. (Original title: “Ryû to sobakasu no hime”)

• Production: (Animated – Japan) A GKIDS (in U.S.), Toho (in Japan) release of a Studio Chizu production. Producers: Yuichiro Saito, Genki Kawamura, Nozomu Takahashi. Executive producers: Keiichi Sawa, Kyo Ito, Nobuaki Tanaka, Takeshi Kikuchi, Yuka Saito. Animation producer: Hiroyuki Ishiguro.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Mamoru Hosoda. Camera: Ryo Horibe, Manabu Kadouno, Yohei Shimozawa. Editor: Shigeru Nishiyama. Music: Ludvig Forssell, Yuta Bandoh, Miho Hazama. Animation director: Hiroyuki Aoyama.
• With: Voice cast (English dub): Kylie McNeill, Chace Crawford, Paul Castro Jr., Manny Jacinto, Hunter Schafer, Brandon Engman, Jessica DiCicco.

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Mamoru Hosoda ’s animated film “ Belle ,” a modern reimagining of “Beauty and the Beast,” sees an outcast by the name of Suzu (voiced by Kaho Nakamura ), discovering community and love on a virtual reality platform called U. Through lush graphics, Hosoda’s fairytale charts the highs and lows of online stardom, and how we act out our innermost selves in the safety of an online world rather than at the behest of a crueler, realer universe. It’s a meticulously crafted, albeit not totally original critique of internet culture, bursting with color and melodramatic teen angst.  

The reserved, lonely Suzu lives in an idyllic countryside, where the bus line, following this summer, will soon be discontinued. Apart from school, where few take notice of her, U is her outlet to the outside world. The brainy, cynical Hiro (voiced by Ikura) is her best friend, her only friend. When she was a child, Suzu’s mother died while trying to save a stranded girl from a raging river. As a result, the now 17-year-old struggles to sing in public and is distant from her father. Only on U, where she becomes the radiant Belle, the platform’s most popular star, can she find the strength to sing.

We soon discover how Suzu is playing a role. See, every avatar on this body-sharing app is created from each user’s unique biometric information. When Suzu created her profile she uploaded a group picture that included Ruka (voiced by Tina Tamashiro ), the most popular and attractive girl at her school, making Belle in her image. 

Hosoda, in the early going of “Belle,” includes “Beauty and the Beast” references in simple ways. Suzu’s online popularity rises until a bruised, caped creature named The Dragon, followed by a cadre of authorities known as the Justices, barrels through her U concert. The justices, a band of muscular bullies dressed like superheroes, want to unveil The Dragon’s true identity because of the way he fights, seemingly punching opponents in the U’s Martial Arts Hall out of rage rather than sport. Sensing an inner-hurt that’s fueling him, Suzu becomes enamored with Dragon, and puts herself in direct opposition to the Justices.      

“Belle” wraps the classic myth in familiar tropes concerning teenagers navigating high school crushes: Suzu’s childhood friend, the handsome and popular Shinobu (voiced by Ryô Narita), for instance, is one such flame whose warmth always seems just out of reach (it doesn’t help that he nauseatingly sees himself as her protector when she doesn’t need one). Any commentary the film tries to give about online culture never rises above the common: The internet exists for some as a therapeutic repository for healing pain and loss, and a toxic landscape for gripes and bullies.  

Rather the draw of “Belle” is its lush animation. At times, it’s cartoonish; in others, it’s hyper-realistic. At most points, the aesthetics morph into fantastical and whimsical shapes. Some images lodge in your brain like a rainbow on a puddle: The modern, virtual recreation of the Beast’s castle, a kind of crystal palace is one. Belle, adorned in a flowing rose-colored dress, singing atop a whale mounted with speakers as millions of avatars in all shapes and sizes surround her, represent another. The most sincere scene: A golden glittering sea of voices outstretched in pure kindness, featuring Suza’s best song, in a movie composed of an ocean of plaintive melodies.  

The way Hosoda’s grandiose script retools “Beauty in the Beast” is equally transfixing. The basic building blocks, its visual odes to the fairy tale, certainly form a sturdy foundation. But Hosoda thoughtfully adds new, emotionally fertile soil to the vintage narrative. From it sprouts a difficult subject whereby the acute pain felt by the voiceless arises. Suzu must learn how her inner strength can also be her outer strength. And how her talent, apart from her spellbinding singing voice, resides in the empathy she shows, not in the popularity others give her.

Hosoda doesn’t offer a wholly new take on either the teenage romance format or online culture, and it's sometimes grating that Suzu must learn to embrace her sense of agency while making room for a love interest that equally believes in her fragility. But the captivating animation and the potent meditations on emotional and physical trauma give “Belle” an aching, gentle spirit worth experiencing.

Now playing in theaters.

Robert Daniels

Robert Daniels is an Associate Editor at RogerEbert.com. Based in Chicago, he is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association (CFCA) and Critics Choice Association (CCA) and regularly contributes to the  New York Times ,  IndieWire , and  Screen Daily . He has covered film festivals ranging from Cannes to Sundance to Toronto. He has also written for the Criterion Collection, the  Los Angeles Times , and  Rolling Stone  about Black American pop culture and issues of representation.

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Film Credits

Belle (2022)

121 minutes

Kaho Nakamura as Suzu Naitō / Belle (voice)

Takeru Satoh as The Beast (voice)

Tina Tamashiro as Ruka Watanabe (voice)

Shota Sometani as Shinjirō Chikami (voice)

Ikura as Hiroka Betsuyaku (voice)

Ryo Narita as Shinobu Hisatake (voice)

Toshiyuki Morikawa as Justian (voice)

Kenjiro Tsuda as Jelinek (voice)

Mami Koyama as Swan (voice)

Mamoru Miyano as Muitarō Hitokawa / Guttokoraemaru (voice)

• Mamoru Hosoda
• Shigeru Nishiyama

Director of Photography

• Kei Machida
• Manabu Kadouno

Original Music Composer

• Taisei Iwasaki
• Yuta Bandoh

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Belle Is a Spectacular Retelling of Beauty and the Beast by Way of the Metaverse

The metaverse has arrived in Belle , and it’s a spectacular sanctuary five billion users strong and thrumming with endless possibility — as well as with all the resentment, shame, obsession, and commercialization that might send someone fleeing from the real world in the first place. Movies tend to reflexively treat online immersion as the stuff of a cautionary tale, but Mamoru Hosoda’s latest is more clear-eyed about the internet being just another home for human messiness. “You can’t start over in reality, but you can start over in U,” a voice-over promises at the outset of Belle , as the film spirals through a dizzying digital landscape to find its heroine belting out a song from the back of a speaker-adorned whale gliding through cyberspace. But while the film’s characters are able to reinvent themselves as virtual pop stars and glowering creatures, their problems still have a way of bleeding through. With the Dragon, the mysterious and violent figure that Suzu (Kaho Nakamura) becomes obsessed with, that bleed is literal. The bright patterns on his back turn out to correspond with bruises on the body of the person controlling it.

Belle is Hosoda’s eighth feature and the one that feels like the most coherent blend of the various universes he’s straddled as an animator. He came up worshiping Miyazaki (who among us) but working on Digimon , and when he was finally offered a job with Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli — he was originally supposed to direct Howl’s Moving Castle — his sensibility didn’t mesh with the house style. Hosoda is prone to exuberant flights of fancy, which extend from casual instances of time travel to magical beasts, but he’s also had a persistent interest in rendering virtual worlds onscreen going back to his Toei days. A 2000 short he made about a rogue Digimon that hacks the Pentagon and launches a ballistic missile at Japan became the inspiration for his 2009 feature Summer Wars , a compelling mutant creation in which a group of teens, with an assist from a well-connected aristocratic family, try to stop an AI intent on bringing about a cheery digital apocalypse. The breathtaking Belle is an explicit attempt to wed the fairy tale with the high tech, retelling Beauty and the Beast by way of social media. But as is often the case with Hosoda, it’s the extracurricular details that make his work so moving, the textures of the everyday lives of his characters that become something larger and more profound when placed in contrast to the genre elements at the center of his story.

Suzu, for instance, may be a celebrity in U, but outside of it she’s a nondescript teenager who’s largely invisible at her school aside from her friendship with the acerbic Hiro (Lilas Ikuta) and the occasional protective gesture from Shinobu (Ryō Narita), a childhood friend who’s grown up to be a heartthrob. The film wordlessly sums up her dying rural community with a montage of her morning commute through empty train stations and quiet bus routes that signs announce are on the verge of being discontinued. When she was young, she witnessed her mother’s death, a memory presented like a totem that she can’t help but haul out and consider whenever she has a quiet moment. Her mother waded into a flooding river and drowned in the process of rescuing a stranded kid, and Suzu has trouble seeing past her own sense of abandonment to glimpse the bravery of this act. This tragedy silenced Suzu, who learned to love music from her mother and found herself unable to sing after her death. It’s only in U, shielded by anonymity and a princess-style avatar with rose-gold hair, that Suzu can free her voice. The pleasant but muted tones of the real world contrast with the overwhelming busyness of U, where the lack of gravity and boundless space allows for a concert venue in the shape of a hollow planet and for crumbling gothic castles as personal hideouts.

U serves as an escape, but Belle keeps drawing parallels between the behavior of people around Suzu and that of the avatars in this supposed digital paradise. When the Dragon interrupts one of Belle’s concerts, he becomes the target of U’s self-appointed police force, whose ultimate weapon is doxing. When Suzu’s suspected of having some kind of romantic entanglement with Shinobu, she barely avoids becoming the target of group-chat gossip deeming her unworthy of such a pairing. Group cruelty, self-righteousness masquerading as justice, and reinforced social strata are as much factors in the fable that inspired Belle as they are in social media, age-old patterns revisited in new digital forms. While Hosoda presents a lot of spectacular imagery, his film’s high point is one that blends its online fantasy world with the mundane real one in a startlingly poignant moment that emphasizes the ways that everything and nothing has changed as humanity keeps moving forward. The metaverse is just the latest means of hiding our most vulnerable parts from the world, and being seen for who we are remains a real act of daring.

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‘Belle’ Review: ‘Beauty and the Beast’ Meets ‘The Matrix’ in Mamoru Hosoda’s Dazzling Anime

David ehrlich.

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2021 Cannes   Film Festival. GKIDS releases the film in theaters on Friday, January 14.

“ Beauty and the Beast ” meets online bullying in a hyper-modern anime riff on the classic fairy tale (or at least the Disney version of it), as “Miraï” director Mamoru Hosoda pushes his boundless imagination to new extremes in a visually dazzling musical about how J-Pop can save the world. If that seems like too much ground for a cartoon to cover in the span of a two-hour coming-of-age story, keep in mind that Hosoda has a knack for reaching familiar places in rivetingly unexpected fashions. Case in point: The heroine of “ Belle ” enters the movie atop a flying humpback whale that’s barnacled with hundreds of stereo speakers.

It’s a fitting introduction to a film that wows you with its wild vision of internet age identity even when it doesn’t reveal anything that isn’t already self-evident. But Hosoda is a born maximalist with a big heart, and while his most ambitious moonshot to date isn’t quite able to arrange all of its moving parts together along the same orbit, it’s impressive to see how many of them remain moving all the same.

At its core, “Belle” is a delirious fusion between a tale as old as time and technology that’s yet to be invented — one set in a world where everyone is desperate to be visible, but deeply afraid of being seen. Still reeling from the death of her mother, 17-year-old Suzu (voiced by Kaho Nakamura) is such an introverted wallflower that her demented hacker BFF Hiroka (Rina Izuta) refers to her as the dark side of the moon. The mousy Suzu doesn’t think she deserves to be described in such grandiose terms; a young former music lover who hasn’t been able to find her voice since her mom drowned saving a random child from a riptide, she thinks of herself instead as “a bell cricket singing in the shadows” (Suzu translates to “bell” in Japanese). There must be more than this provincial life, but Suzu is too withdrawn to explore what that might be, and her emotionally distant dad (the great Kôji Yakusho in a small role) isn’t going to be much help.

That’s when Suzu discovers the world of “U.” How is it that she hadn’t known about a fully immersive social media service (with five billion users!) that invites people to be reborn as avatars that are determined from biometric analyses of their inner strengths? It’s best not to ask such questions about the ins and outs of this virtual reality landscape; nobody can be told what the Matrix is, and the same applies to U. Suffice to say that it looks like an eye-popping cross between the digital world of OZ from Hosoda’s “Summer Wars” and the endless downtown mind city of the lowest dream level from “Inception.”

Unlike the ruined wasteland in Christopher Nolan’s film, however, U is teeming with a ridiculous array of characters who range from starfish to luchadores to a squadron of self-appointed Justices who dress in matching white superhero outfits and police the cybersphere by effectively doxxing anyone they deem unworthy. At the top of their most wanted list: A hunched MMA-fighting cow monster named Dragon — but not so affectionately referred to as “the Beast.” Little do the Justices know that their quarry broods away his time in a floating castle on the outskirts of a glitchy wooded maze and guards his deepest secret inside a bushel of binary roses.

But the Beast is yesterday’s news in the U-niverse now that everyone’s obsessed with the platform’s newest superstar, a radiant singer named Belle (whose absolute banger of a debut single is performed by the J-pop group millennium parade). Belle, of course, is our dear Suzu IRL, though only to a certain extent; her avatar’s pink-haired and pointy-nosed anime perfection is owed to Suzu’s prettiest classmate, whose face she borrowed out of an abiding sense of insecurity. Everybody has a secret, and sometimes it feels like the only way to survive on the internet is to keep everybody else from wanting to know what yours might be. If only computers gave us more than just two options: “Cancel” or “Okay.”

For all of its supercharged visual spectacle and the frisson that Hosoda creates from threading a fairy tale story through the ugliness of the online world, this is mighty familiar material for anime fans who’ve been looking for digital connections since the wired days of “Serial Experiments Lain,” or JRPG players who’ve grappled with the malignant darkness of our shadow selves in the “Persona” series for hundreds of hours at a time. The beauty of “Belle,” however strained it can be, is that Hosoda sincerely believes in the potential upside of social media — he recognizes that most people on the internet are looking for someone to feel their pain rather than someone to inflict it upon (a subtle distinction, easily confused). Many of them just don’t quite realize that. Not even Belle herself, whose curiosity in the Beast is only explained in the most abstract terms, and isn’t quite strong enough to support the obligatory ballroom dancing sequence.

The fact that Suzu’s mom died saving a total stranger is the kind of first act detail that can be easily lost in a movie that unfolds like a technicolor parade of stray ideas; on top of everything else, “Belle” also makes time for several unexpectedly affecting romantic subplots, a Greek chorus of middle-aged women who share a big secret, and a scene in which Suzu’s social circle is represented as a fiery game of “Risk.” But no matter how many things are happening between the film’s analog and online worlds, Hosoda constantly returns to the selfless philosophy embodied by Suzu’s mom: The concept that a stranger’s life might be afforded the same value that we typically reserve for our own. It’s an idea that exists in violent contradiction to how the internet usually works, which is why it manages to cut through the noise and hold this movie together even when its finale blurs the border that separates the U from “reality” by introducing a handful of pivotal new characters.

Not all of Hosoda’s ideas manage to hold as much water, and some (particularly the positive implication that pain can be a source of online strength) are so glancingly explored that including them here does more harm than good. The flimsier those concepts are, the flimsier the drama is to support them. The connection between the Dragon and their actual identity is poignant but underdeveloped in a way that makes the “Beauty and the Beast” of it all feel shoehorned into a movie that only needs that aspect of it for its  metaphor. Meanwhile, the relationships between Suzu and the people she knows IRL are rendered so beautifully in the little time Hosoda affords them that it’s hard not to wish he’d scale back on sensory-overload spectacle and let real life do the talking. It’s telling that the film’s best scene is contained within a single, motionless shot inside of an ordinary train station.

Nevertheless, “Belle” earns much of its charm from the sheer mania of Hosoda’s mind. The film may be stretched too thin as the real world and the U pull it in opposite directions, but that same tug-of-war between basic human feelings and the impossibly colorful orgy of emotions they explodes into online — the way it frays on both ends, and makes it hard for the center to hold — is also what allows “Belle” to feel so true even as it falls deeper and deeper into fairy tale logic. If the moral of this story is ultimately a simple one, at least Suzu learns it in a way too novel to forget: The internet can give anyone a voice, but it’s only a beautiful place when people actually hear each other.

“Belle” premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. GKids will release it in the United States later this year.

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