Fantastical world of japanese anime ub movie#

Fantastical world of japanese anime ub movie#

Unlike the more sinister visions of humanity's online immersion popularised in movies like The Matrix, Hosoda's take on the virtual realm has always been ambivalent – even optimistic – about the technology's potential power to augment and transform the user's real-world self.įor a filmmaker who began his feature career with the virtual menagerie of Digimon: The Movie (2000), and whose Summer Wars (2009) explored the concept of an immersive online world, his U-niverse in Belle feels like the natural extension of so many of his artistic concerns. ( Supplied: Kismet)ĭesigned by veteran Disney character animator Jin Kim, whose work includes Tangled, the Frozen films and the recent Encanto, Belle combines the look of those films' wide-eyed princesses with their anime counterparts, her traditionally drawn features rendered – like much of Hosoda's movie – in a fluid blend of 2D and computer animation. The Wonderful and Diverse World of Japanese Animation a/K/A Anime: Directed by Bryan Lyles.

Hosoda trained as an oil painter at university, before working with animation studios Toei and Studio Ghibli, and directing a video for Louis Vuitton. It’s been a bumper year for fans of Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away, as 2021 marks the 20th anniversary of the film’s 2001 debut in cinemas. A high-tech anime riff on Beauty and the Beast set between the virtual and the real, the shimmering new film from Oscar-nominated Japanese director Mamoru Hosoda (Mirai Wolf Children) is a fable for the era of augmented reality a study in the digital performance of self that doubles as a pretty neat pop star fantasia.īelle takes its audience inside an immersive virtual world known as U, where some 5 billion people log in with fantasy avatars generated by a unique app that biometrically syncs to the user – channelling their innermost selves through an uncanny synthesis of the physical and the digital.Īs science fiction, it's barely a stretch from the online present, where augmented reality, custom avatars and identity-scrambling filters have become a part of daily interaction.īack in old-fashioned, real-world Japan, mousy country teenager Suzu (voiced by Kaho Nakamura) is a high-school wallflower haunted by the loss of her mother at a young age, an event that put an end to her childhood dreams of playing music and caused her to become melancholy and withdrawn.Įncouraged by her best friend-turned-musical svengali Hiroka (Lilas Ikuta), Suzu logs in to U and creates an avatar who becomes Belle – an impossibly radiant, pink-haired cyber-princess who extracts Suzu's latent musical gifts and blows them up to pop superstar dimensions. Bring a little Studio Ghibli magic into the home.