Belle (2021)

Belle arrives from Studio Chizu with a Cannes ovation, a Beauty and the Beast lineage, and the full weight of Mamoru Hosoda's reputation behind it. It is a wholly Japanese production, set in rural Kochi Prefecture, performed by a Japanese voice cast, and concerning itself with a teenage girl, a virtual world, and a dead mother. There is no diversity casting initiative at work here, no racial commentary, no LGBTQ subplot, no economic grievance, no climate reckoning. Those registers simply are not opened. The film is content to be a science fantasy musical about grief, and it commits to that brief with unusual sincerity.

Where a certain contemporary sensibility does surface is in the encouragement of the self. Suzu is a girl who has lost her singing voice and her confidence, and the avatar the system assigns her, freckles included, becomes the vessel through which she reclaims both. The title translates literally as the dragon and the freckled princess, and the arc moves from shame about her appearance toward a working peace with it. She also takes it upon herself to save a boy from a violent father, staring the man down without flinching, a rescue performed alone, at night, in Kawasaki. That is empowerment of a sturdy, old-fashioned kind, closer to a coming-of-age catharsis than a manifesto.

The moral instruction, such as it is, stays light. Child abuse and the mob justice of a virtual world's self-appointed Justices are folded into an emotional story instead of announced from a pulpit. The messaging is heartfelt, occasionally indulgent, and never sermonizing. This critic, wearied by a decade of cinema that lectures first and entertains second, found the restraint a small mercy.