Make Believe Mailer 34: Me And "U"
Mamoru Hosoda's "Belle," Virtual Popstars And Utopian Metaverses
Belle (or, Ryu To Sobakasu No Hime), Out In Select U.S. Theaters Now
Minor Spoilers Follow
The most dazzling moments of Mamoru Hosada’s Belle happen when the border between digital and IRL worlds breaks. Sullen high-school student Suzu transforms into her online alter-ego Belle when she logs onto an immersive app / world called “U” — a sort of social-media-age Second Life — and her avatar quickly becomes a musical sensation, as it allows the hesitant teen behind the 1s and 0s to express a long-dormant vocal ability.
Hosoda captures the early rush of virality — of the doldrums of life in a backwater town suddenly interrupted by a flood of smartphone notifications, adoring social media posts, fan art and corporate comes-on hungry for tie-ups. The “real world” and the digitized space of “U” have an uneasy relationship throughout Belle — seemingly everyone on the planet escapes into it, to the point where a CNN-like news channel breathlessly covers “drama” within “U,” as if Rachel Maddow got the boot in favor of Keemstar, but the few moments where reality breaks into the online are treated as rapturous rarities. Yet the attention Suzu’s avatar receives looks the same in the 3-D “U” and the 2-D version of Kochi Prefecture presented in the movie. For perhaps the only time in Belle, the two sides blur together to hint at something truly hybrid.
The reason I decided to see Belle — Ryu To Sobakasu No Hime in Japanese, i.e. what I had to say to the ticket counter person — back in July 2021 was because…I was in Nagoya and bored. This was a day into the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, and for my own mental well-being I sacrificed my physical well-being by taking a weekend trip built around drinking limited-edition dessert drinks. While Japan’s fourth largest city was buzzing on this hot summer night, I wasn’t quite brave enough to shed my COVID-19 anxiety and hang out in a bar. Instead, I saw my first film in a theater since the pandemic started. It was that or stay in my shabby business hotel room and watch judo highlights.
I chose Belle because it revolved around a topic endlessly fascinating to me — virtual popstars. While the musical ups and downs of Belle’s career make up a tiny portion of a film re-imagining Beauty And The Beast for the Fortnite era, it still plays a central role in the film (including contributing to the climax of the whole narrative). The intersection of pop and online worlds felt novel enough last summer to get me out.
Belle arrived in North American theaters earlier this year (coming to the UK in February), and over the last six months since I saw it the movie went from film-festival darling to zeitgeisty. “Gorgeous anime tale Belle sends Beauty And The Beast into the metaverse.” “Mamoru Hosoda on How He Built Belle's Metaverse.” “How The Stunning Metaverse Costumes In Belle Came To Life.” In less than half a year, “metaverse” has become one of those inescapable tech buzzwords that you have to wrangle with if you spend time online. The global music industry has been trying to figure out their approach to virtual spaces for a long time, but it feels more accelerated in recent times, spurred on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fittingly, the “live music experience set in an online space” part of this opens in…what looks like a sleepy part of Kyoto, not too far off from “Belle.”
Hosada takes an optimistic view on the internet in Belle, to a nearly comical degree. Everyone seemingly plugs into “U” and generally has few problems.1 The cynicism of/about online in 2022 is absent. Sponsorships, one of the rare topics emerging in the film where it feels like Hosada might be setting up to ding modern influencer culture, are ultimately shown as a good element, with one character being stripped of their sponsored-by tags presented as punishment. “U” is a place to slip into and become an idolized version of one’s self, but with none of the quicksand feel found when you try that in real life.
This all starts making more sense when you find out Hosada doesn’t really use social media, as mentioned in an interview with The Los Angeles Times.
“I wanted to make sure we were depicting a rather positive side of the internet. To your point, there is definitely a lot of toxicity, and I wanted to make sure that side of the internet was also represented in the movie because it’s important to show the reality of what is happening. In spite of that, overall, I believe it has the potential to shift in a more positive direction. Whenever there’s a really groundbreaking new technology or innovation, there’s a tendency to, especially from adults, interpret it in a much more negative light.”
Hosada’s naivety about life online today ultimately helps Belle out significantly. He’s tapping into something I believe a countless number of people feel — that digital spaces could be better, and actually help them express who they really are. Perhaps I’m extending too much credit to these companies, but I think the folks behind this new wave of “metaverses” share that sentiment. The difference is Silicon Valley types lack the creativity to offer true escapism, providing only torso-less humans floating around an uninspiring imitation of the world we already know. Hosada, however, imagines an actual flight of fancy, with a backdrop unlike the hum-drum users would be familiar with and the chance to, truly, become someone different.
One of the best Japanese music books released in the 21st century is journalist Tomonori Shiba’s 2014 Hatsune Miku Wa Naze Sekai Wo Kaeta No Ka?, or Why Did Hatsune Miku Change The World? It features dozens of interviews with individuals associated with the Vocaloid community the titular, aqua-haired character came to represent, while also offering a hell of a hypothesis, present on the cover of the book…that the arrival of easy-to-purchase singing-synthesize software enabled something like a third “summer of love,” referring specifically to the creative outburst emerging from the late ‘60s hippie movement and the U.K. rave scene of the early 1990s.
Hatsune Miku zipped around my brain during the entirety of Belle, and in the hours spent after rethinking about the film and “avatar pop,” a phenomenon that has already arrived. Depending on how you want to stretch the definition, virtual popstars have been a part of the musical landscape since Alvin And The Chipmunks, but the current state of our collective digital lives has made the intersection of music and “metaverse” particularly relevant. Here’s Travis Scott literally towering over Fortnite, and making bank. Here’s The Weeknd’s cartoon standin dramatically posing on TikTok, and here’s Justin Bieber singing “Peaches” on top of a Rockstar-Games-quality car for…somebody to enjoy. Here’s KWANGYA, beckoning you towards it despite not having a clue what it actually is.2
All of the above and the endless efforts to cash in that follow share a surprisingly old-school attitude. Like Kyoko Date before them, all of them are traditional “talents” / pop stars simply entering a polygon-centric realm. Viewers and fans largely play a passive role — they can provide “likes” and other digital signs of support, but aren’t actually helping craft anything. They just absorb.
I think people, at least in theory, desire more than just familiar relationships with stars in their digital lives. As marketing for various “metaverses” and shows like FOX’s Alter Ego (above) stress, avatars and virtual worlds can offer transcendence. That’s central to Belle’s online utopia too — we can become whoever we want…or, who we are meant to be…by slipping away from our drab physical existence in favor of a bright, Technicolor shared fantasy.
Big tech and Hosada both, however, fall for the appeal of celebrity above something more. William Gibson’s novel Idoru imagined a world where a top-level pop act became customized for each individual fan, offering everyone exactly the star they wanted. Reality, as it often is, has proven far duller. Pop stars don’t have to bend to anyone’s wants or desires…instead, modern online fandom is happy to support whatever they present to them.
It’s something Belle gets totally right, even if by acciddent — Suzu transforms into Belle within “U,” and undergoes a journey of self-introspection…but at the same time presumably millions of people just became obsessed with her, sharing fanart and messages about what they’ve seen. She’s a character with an arc, but for others in this film’s world, she’s another star to orbit. 3
It all leads back to Hatsune Miku, and the weird moment in the late Aughts / early 2010s when Vocaloid offered the closest environment to what Belle and countless metaverses imagine a digital utopia to be. Miku, like Hello Kitty or Pikachu, has been a branding force. Yet she and the software she represents also offers an actual imaginative spark and animated mask to don. Anybody could generate music, draw the character as they want or create videos featuring them. It wasn’t an online oasis to plug in to, but rather something everyone could build together. Stars emerged, sure, but the feeling of equal access and shared creativity powered all of it.
Critically, the creators made it all fair game via the Piapro Character License, a creative commons license encouraging use from fans to play with the sounds and characters as they saw fit.4 Hosada wisely didn’t devote significant time to the inner workings of “U” in Belle, but a doofus like me wondered at various times…does Suzu own Belle? Does the company responsible for this metaverse hold the copyright for all of these characters? Can Suzu monetize these songs, or are they now the property of some gigacorp? Fun exercises while thinking about a movie…but also topics that should become central as “web 3.0” or whatever it ends up being called is shoved down our throats.
Vocaloid’s legacy is thorny — no musical community has proved more influential in modern Japanese music, but whatever techno-optimism it held in the 2000s has been replaced as a projectile aimed at a society on a slow decline, or for mourning over a web-based playground now abandoned. Yet having to think about metaverses or digital escapes, I can only imagine one of the rare times where the real and online coalleseced just right.
Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies
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MINOR SPOILER: It is a bit funny though that one of the lessons from this movie is — it’s cool when millions of people love your online avatar in an immersive virtual world, but helping a single person in the real world is much more rewarding.
LONG ASIDE ABOUT KWANGYA INCOMING: First off, let’s get the caveats out of the way. Despite a rocky start, aespa stand as the most interesting group coming out of a top-level K-pop company in 2022. “Savage” was great, even if future generations will be left baffled by the lyrics. The members of the group themselves seem like sweet people, and whenever I see behind-the-scenes footage of them I’m always left charmed and confused as to why SM Entertainment decided they had to be the ones with The Sims alter egos. Critically, aespa and the entire KWANGYA concept — I recently had to write about aespa for a copywriting gig, and the editor asked “could you elaborate on KWANGYA” and my entire nervous system shut down — doesn’t actually represent “the metaverse” or even “the internet as we use it.” KWANGYA is — was? — some effort at building an “expanded universe” where I imagine the end goal was to have BoA star in a Netflix original where she fights aliens or something. A truly batshit piece of content bound to be forgotten is “aespa 에스파 'ep1. Black Mamba' - SM Culture Universe,” the first and to this point only effort to establish anyting solid about the aforementioned “SM Culture Universe.” It engages with the online in the way a particularly hacky Twitter account would — “when you write LOL, are you really laughing?” — and offers more questions than answers, the surest sign of a company trying to imitate Marvel. I have no idea what aespa the avatars are supposed to be, and I sort of think Lee Soo-man doesn’t either. Right now, you can audition for KWANGYA…but what does that even mean (besides “being under 20”)? A year from now, this whole lark could be scrapped, the avatars will be sold as NFTs to the wackest K-pop fans in existence, and aespa can just be a good pop group.
What Belle most closely captures in our world is virtual YouTubing, where one person can transform into the perfect them, or at least a character approximating it…and most others can just follow along and throw them Super Chats.
Suggested re-framing of Japanese entertainment in the 21st century — the country features some of the most draconian and behind-the-times companies in the world…but could also be really ahead of the curve and…sorta radical.