![]() ![]() It’s like walking through a shopping mall. So of course he got a whole bunch of different intellectual properties, different characters, and threw them into one movie. And of course it’s imagined by Spielberg, who is an older guy who doesn’t know what the next generation is going to look like. This is not Ready Player One, and I’m going to be quite frank here, but I think their expression of the internet is not really cool or forward-looking. I wanted to empathize with those young people but at the same time to encourage them.Ĭompared to a lot of movies, especially recent ones, Belle focuses on the interpersonal connections that can be formed online rather than the commercialization of the internet. Social media should be somewhere you can enjoy yourself and feel confident, but it seems like in Japan at least, the opposite is happening - possibly in other countries as well. Although social media has the power to connect you to anyone in the world, there is an incredible number of lonely young people in Japan, and they have very low self-esteem. They enjoy the freedom of being anonymous and are scared of people finding out who they are. And it seems like the worst thing for young people on social media is to be found out, exposing who they are. ![]() One big difference between when I was young and young people nowadays is social media. ![]() So I want to show the internet as not a place to be attacked but a place to discover yourself and find hope.Ī big source of conflict is the fear of being exposed online, of having your real identity be unveiled to the world. But her online alter ego, Belle, is the total opposite, and she has an effect on Suzu in real life: She gives her the strength to protect people in the real world. In the film, Suzu is a quiet girl without self-confidence. I think it is hard, but I want young people to not feel defeated by cyberbullying and trolling and to keep on expressing themselves and finding the strength to change themselves and society, which is why I came up with the character of Belle. How do you remain hopeful despite the toxicity of social media and the internet? Trolling is a big problem in Japanese society, so the challenge was to make a film that remained positive and hopeful about the future of the internet despite all its issues. There is no left or right or up and down, so it’s got this mysterious megacity feel to it to show how much people have contributed to this space and how much it’s come to reflect the real world, including the bad. We designed U to feel more cramped with a lot of tall buildings. The internet has become much closer to reality, so I wanted it to feel like a full world. With Belle, I’ve seen how everyone has begun using social media and the internet in general to connect with each other, not just young people. By the time I made Summer Wars, it had a warmer and more vibrant color palette as more people started participating and using the internet. When I worked on Digimon Adventure in 2000, the internet was mainly used by young people, and it was kind of a new frontier full of possibilities, so we chose to represent it as a big, white, open space. How has your perception of it changed over those years? You have been making movies about the internet for over 20 years. In an interview with Vulture, Hosoda spoke via a translator about channeling the internet through film, the toxicity of social media, working with former Disney character designers, and why he made his Gaston a superhero. ![]() In his latest directorial effort, Hosoda imagines a Technicolor metropolis with billions of users, where music has the power to change the world and the internet can help you save a life, all while delivering a rather funny coming-of-age tale with some of the catchiest bangers of the year. Where many films portraying the online world show it to be a lawless place rife with danger and the abuses of late-stage capitalism, Mamoru Hosoda has been showing us a more hopeful view of what it can be since he directed Digimon Adventure: Our War Game! 22 years ago, highlighting the internet’s power to help us connect with one another and discover ourselves. The film follows a young girl who discovers she can overcome her social anxieties by hiding under an anonymous internet persona and overnight becomes the biggest pop star in U, the film’s version of the internet. One of the best animated films of the past few years, Belle tells a roaring, tragic, uplifting new spin on Beauty and the Beast for the Extremely Online generation. ![]()
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