Belle is an anime film that was released during the later months of 2021. Directed and written by Hosoda Mamoru, the same person behind great works that is Wolf Children and The Boy and the Beast, but instead of keeping the momentum going with his current works, he decided to go back to his late 2000s days and made summer wars 2, I mean Belle.



Belle is heavily inspired by disney, from the premise of this movie following that of Beauty and the Beast and the musical timing in the film matches that of a disney one as well, just toned down by excluding the weird background changing or everyone in the region joining in the choir. Speaking purely from a visual and music standpoint, Belle is an outstanding piece of work.



The visuals for this film is something else, completely blowing Hello World into the dumpster, proving that 3D animation does belong on the big screen, by using only 3D in their virtual world “U”, and by establishing how 3D will be used in the film, they are able to make two visually contrasting setting for the story being the virtual world “U” and the real world. That aside, the 3D in U is used in a very unique and nice way, by making most of the character and users float through U, they are able to avoid the clunkiness of 3D models running on air although they should be in contact with the floor, making the characters more “grounded” although they are mostly floating or flying around. They used the lighting to their advantage as well, by making the world of U slightly dim (like discord dark mode), they avoided the issue of 3D visuals being either over exposed or under exposed. I can go on forever if we’re talking about the visuals, but without boring you too much, the tl:dr ver is that this film is extremely visually stunning.



Then there’s the songs used in the film, which are mostly songs sung by Belle. The lyrics aren’t too deep, at times singing out exactly how she is feeling or what is going on, but in the context of the film, a lot of it fits what is going on. I will go into this part deeper later on.


The plot of Belle is… to put it bluntly, a mess. The story is not all over the place like summer wars, but damn the execution, it’s abysmal, the characters barely have any time for their development or growth, the so called antagonist (not the justice dude, that guy is actually somewhat believable thanks to awkward the turtle and other reddit mods) but the father of Ryu, dude barely have anything to him, only for him to be unveiled as a child abuser. And the only reason they found where the boys are at is because of a window in a video, 4-chan tier detective work right there, this part is so dumb and out of place it made my brain numb.



But credit given where credit is due, this is an enjoyable experience to say the least, the

references and comedic timing hit most of the time, like the Civ reference was nice and the confession scene is cringe and awkward humor at its finest. I had my fun and enjoyed the musical and visual aspect of the film. It is not the greatest nor the worst anime film, but at least it brought enjoyment.

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To begin with, I urge the reader to disregard whatever that had been written up there that regards both the visuals and the writing of the movie. As we are here to discuss the musical brilliance as presented and produced by and for the movie.



The particular track that takes Center Stage of the entire movie - which is also the particular track that I really want to talk about, is the track “A Million Miles Away”. This particular track is featured towards the climax of the film, where the protagonist eventually used this particular song to express her rawest emotions thus far into the film. Aside from the brilliant vocal work and the fantastic use of supporting instruments to perfectly set both the atmosphere and weight of the scene, the entire piece of music is further amplified by the sounds of a distant crowd, joining in to sing the melody. It’s extremely difficult to put such a powerful part of the music into words without writing an entire essay regarding the reasons behind it so, but I believe the readers may get the gist at this point. Not to mention, after that somber section, the entire music goes into full swing, and the main vocalist returns again with a supporting brilliance of strings and synths, as the vocalist proceeds to urge everyone to sing.



To say that this track is, again, powerful, would be an understatement. If not for my prior opinions, I believe this is one such track that I’d shed a tear for, even without prior context, and out of pure imagination as a listener of the music.



The two other tracks that are featured in this film does a likewise, amazing job at expressing their ideas, and fulfills their purpose while in the context of the story. “U” does a great job setting the atmosphere at the beginning of the movie, and sings about a valuable lesson that I believe some of us can make use of; Although I am not a particular fan of tracks that feature a modern pop setting, it’s composition is great enough by itself to grab my attention when I first heard it, so that’s a piece of credit that I’ll wholly give to their creators.



“Gales of Song” and “Lend me your voice” are both atmospheric tracks that wonderfully express what they are meant to express, they are well enough as standalone tracks, and I’ll leave it at that, else you'll be reading a bit too much at this point.



What did you think about the movie?