Page 2 January 13, 2022
Belle Mixes Beauty and
The Beast with the Metaverse
Morgan Rojas for Cinemacy
When Mark Zuckerberg recently announced
Facebook’s plans of creating a virtual reality
– “The Metaverse” – to the world, I
immediately thought of the online virtual
parties that I “attended” during last year’s
Sundance Film Festival. My user-created
avatar mingled with other online avatars
“at the bar” and “on the dance floor,” but in
reality, I was simply navigating my character
from the comfort of my couch. I thought to
myself, “This future is kind of a bummer.”
But as the new movie Belle shows, maybe
I just wasn’t in the “right” virtual reality.
In this new mesmerizing animated film,
Academy Award-nominated director Mamoru
Hosoda shows us that not all virtual societies
are awkward fantasy lands. Distributed
by legendary Anime production company
GKids, Belle is a cautionary tale about the
joys and dangers that can be experienced as
we all continue to grow up using immersive
social media.
Painfully shy schoolgirl Suzu is the embodiment
of adolescent insecurity. Having
lost her mother as a child, she has always
struggled to live a fully secure life. That
changes when she downloads the app “U,”
a fully immersive virtual society that boasts
over 5 billion users. Through “U’s” advanced
technology, Suzu’s hidden strengths in the real
world are used to create her online avatar.
And so, she gets the confidence that she so
desperately lacks in the real world to excel
in an alternate, online one.
She creates the avatar “Belle”: a beautiful,
fairy-esque woman with cotton candy hair
and the voice of an angel. As Belle, Suzu
dazzles everyone with her charm and talent.
She makes the other avatars feel good about
themselves, and in turn, she begins appreciating
and embracing her individuality within
the metaverse.
Her connection gets disrupted when a
cyberbully known as “The Beast” begins
trolling the other avatars and threatening her
safety online. Determined to restore peace
within “U,” Belle takes it upon herself to
uncover the identity behind the Beast, hoping
that by knowing that while second chances
are hard to come by in reality, everyone can
start over in “U.”
If you’re thinking this sounds like a hybrid
of Beauty and the Beast meets The Matrix,
you’re not wrong. Belle is a young woman
in distress who is trying to comfort an unruly
Beast, only to realize that it’s his pain that
is masquerading as strength. And he’s not
truly a horrible person after all.
Despite being an animated film, Belle is
not necessarily a children’s movie. Director
Mamoru Hosoda takes familiar childhood
themes of bullying, friendship, and forgiveness
and presents them through the lens of
future-facing technology which feels like an
optimistic, albeit slightly naive, view of the
upcoming digital trends.
Having sat through the film completely
enthralled with the complexity and beauty
of this make believe virtual reality, I’m more
open to giving avatar parties another chance.
And with the news that this year’s Sundance
Film Festival is going completely virtual this
year, I may just have my chance.
Belle is in theaters this Friday, January 14. •
Belle, courtesy GKids.
Morgan Rojas
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See Finance, page 5