#FEATURE: The BELLE Trailer is a Perfect Example of Mamoru Hosoda's Art

“#FEATURE: The BELLE Trailer is a Perfect Example of Mamoru Hosoda's Art”

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Why It Works. Have you checked out the latest trailer for BELLE? It seems like Mamoru Hosoda has truly outdone himself this time, collaborating with a variety of profoundly talented artists and animators to create a rich variety of visual worlds. BELLE’s gorgeous compositions and wild proliferation of visual styles already have me excited for the film to come, while at the same time, its story actually felt comfortably familiar. In fact, there are echoes of BELLE’s narrative stretching across Hosoda’s work, as if he’d been planning to make this film all along.

BELLE

Image via Charades

Admittedly, this isn’t the most surprising fact. All great artists have specific passions they return to, key facets of their personalities or beliefs that come through clearly in their work. Hayao Miyazaki will never resolve his contradictory passion for nature and technology, or his giddy wonder at the idea of a human in flight. Makoto Shinkai will likely always be offering stories of star-crossed lovers and the infinite distance between outstretched hands. Mamoru Oshii will always be ruminating on the alienation of modernity and militarism while including a basset hound or two on the side.

So it goes for Hosoda, whose works repeatedly demonstrate the questions and passions that inspire his art. For one, Hosoda is clearly preoccupied with the complex nature of family and the ways we situate ourselves in relation to those we care about. Wolf Children is all about the complexity of motherhood, while Boy and the Beast offered a similar reflection on fatherhood. For his most recent feature Mirai, he focused on a brother and his newborn sister as the brother grappled with how his whole family dynamic changed in light of this new addition. And Summer Wars essentially sets an entire extended family as its “main character,” creating an ensemble experience like few other anime films.

BELLE

Image via Charades

Hosoda is also clearly preoccupied with “portal fantasy,” or the strange dividing line between worlds. All of the films mentioned so far have dealt with the gap between different worlds in a variety of ways. Wolf Children presents a dichotomy between the human world and that of wolves, in order to explore how we must let our children embrace their own destiny. In Boy and the Beast, the “other world” is one of sentient animals, and in Mirai (as well as The Girl Who Leapt Through Time), it is the world of the past. Of course, in Summer Wars, the “other world” is the internet, a place where we can assume new identities and embrace a new form of community.

It is this preoccupation with the internet that provides our final threat of connection across Hosoda’s works, starting from well before he was making blockbuster original productions. Hosoda’s very first films were produced at Toei animation, where he helmed the first two Digimon movies, including the prescient Digimon Adventure: Our War Game! In that film, the heroes discover a corrupted digimon on the internet that grows by consuming data and are forced to enter the internet themselves in order to battle their foe.

That synopsis might seem familiar to anyone who’s seen Summer Wars, and Hosoda himself has admitted that Our War Game! was a blueprint for his later film. It seems like Hosoda isn’t done with this concept, as BELLE once again returns to a conflict between the physical and digital worlds, while also embracing his clear fascination with how we form attachments and communities across these spaces. Heck, even his fondness for trans-species relationships seems reaffirmed by BELLE and the bond between its human and wolf-like protagonists.

BELLE

Image via Charades

Art cannot resolve the complexity of a topic like family or societal connection; it can only articulate it, and through doing so, offer the audience a new perspective on concepts we all struggle with. None of the great questions of existence can be resolved by art; but by returning to these questions over the years, artists can create a personal history through drama and illustrate their own shifting relationship with the questions that all of us face. Hosoda’s past films have helped me to reassess my own relationship with the world and people around me and moved me to tears with their depictions of intimate human connection. BELLE might well be Hosoda’s most beautiful film so far, but even more than its visual delights, I’m looking forward to seeing the new perspective he brings to these old questions. What are your thoughts, Hosoda?

Nick Creamer has been writing about cartoons for too many years now and is always ready to cry about Madoka. You can find more of his work at his blog Wrong Every Time, or follow him o n T witter.

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