Hosoda saw some of Wong’s mind-bogglingly detailed fantasy cityscapes online and emailed him out of the blue, Wong explains. To design Belle’s metaverse, Hosoda recruited Eric Wong, a British architect and illustrator based in London. As with Belle’s U, Oz is a visually sumptuous virtual world: this time a clean, white, pop-art realm filled with rainbow-coloured graphics and characters, designed by celebrated artist Takashi Murakami. Half the story is a kind of meet-the-parents teen romcom the other half is set in a proto-metaverse named Oz, whose hacking threatens to destroy the planet.
GUY WHO MADE SUMMER WARS MOVIE
Today he is one of the most successful anime directors in Japan, thanks to hits like The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Wolf Children, The Boy and the Beast, and Belle’s Oscar-nominated predecessor, Mirai, which premiered at Cannes in 2018.Ī significant precursor to Belle was Hosoda’s 2009 movie Summer Wars, which also straddles real and virtual worlds. However, he clashed creatively with Ghibli’s boss Hayao Miyazaki (who eventually directed the movie himself), and Hosoda went his own way. It was strictly for kids, but enough to catch the attention of the mighty Studio Ghibli, which in 2001 asked him to direct Howl’s Moving Castle. He began his career with the Pokémon-like Digimon franchise, including a short film about an evil virus that consumes data and takes over the internet. Hosoda has been engaging with digital worlds for more than two decades now. This is the new world they find themselves in, and it’s all about how they create that world for themselves.” “Us grownups see the internet and we think, ‘This is reality, and that’s not reality,’ but for young people it’s more: ‘This is the real world and that’s another world.’ It’s just as real and just as valuable, and how you behave in that online world is also part of reality. His inspiration was watching his five-year-old daughter growing up in a world where things like smartphones and social media have always existed. “I think I’m a rare example, maybe the only example.” He had never heard the term “metaverse” until after Belle’s release, he says. “There aren’t many directors who have shown an online world in a positive way,” says Hosoda, a bookish, mild-mannered man dressed all in black. When she enters the huge online world of “U”, however, she becomes the exact opposite: her secret alter ego is a pink-haired pop goddess with a golden voice and millions of adoring followers. Our hero is Suzu, a lonely, introverted teenager in rural Japan who lost her ability to sing after the death of mother. It is a story about how virtual identities can conceal or reveal people’s hidden facets (as the title suggests, there are Beauty and the Beast parallels). But, rather than portraying the online world as a place of cruelty and corporate overreach, it suggests it could be one of sanctuary, even salvation, especially for young people. Belle does not gloss over the harmful aspects of digital life such as online abuse, viral gossip and doxing (publicly revealing personal information). From virtual reality (the Matrix movies, Tron), to artificial intelligence (the Terminator franchise, Ex Machina, The Mitchells vs the Machines), from social media (Catfish, Eighth Grade, Unfriended) to real-life tech titans like, er, Mark Zuckerberg (The Social Network), we’ve seen enough to put us off ever going online.Īll of which makes Mamoru Hosoda’s new anime, Belle, a refreshing alternative. Hollywood has rarely met a new technology it couldn’t make seem terrifying and wrong. If we’re feeling paranoid about our metaverse future, it might also have something to do with our movies. Plus, many felt there was something pretty dystopian about an immersive new online world controlled by a corporation with a track record of misinformation spreading, data gathering and disseminating harmful body images. The Facebook supremo’s awkward presentation style made it feel like an AI-generated missive from beyond the uncanny valley. Fears about our digital future were not assuaged last October when Mark Zuckerberg released a video trailing the delights of “the metaverse”.
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