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On Tuesday, March 4, Konami Digital Entertainment streamed "Gensou Suikoden Live," an official web program providing the latest information on the Suikoden RPG series, which began releasing in 1995, and announced various future developments, including a TV anime and stage play adaptations. The TV anime series, titled Suikoden: The Anime , is based on Suikoden II , the second installment of the game series released for the PlayStation video game console in 1998. Yuzo Sato ( Muteking The Dancing Hero ) serves as the director at Konami animation. Broadcast date, voice cast members and other details will be announced in the future. The first stage play inspired by the game series, titled "Genso Suikoden - Mon no Monshou Sensou-hen" ("Suikoden: The Crest of the Gate War Arc"), is based on the series' first installment, Suikoden , released for the PlayStation in 1995. Norihito Nakayashiki serves as director on his own script. The plays is set to preform in Theater...

Shows about high school are hardly new. From early examples like "Happy Days" and "The Wonder Years" to the '90s heyday of "Dawson's Creek" and "Beverly Hills 90210," teenage drama has always been a part of the television landscape. Many of us look back on our time in high school with a mix of horror and embarrassment, but the years between 9th and 12th grade have never been more stressful than in Sam Levinson's "Euphoria." The HBO drama is a daring mix of grit and glitter that follows 17-year-old Rue Bennet (Zendaya) as she struggles to navigate her junior year while battling a debilitating drug addiction. "Euphoria" has faced its share of criticism (most notably from D.A.R.E) that the show glamorizes drug use. Defenders say it's an authentic portrayal of a disease that affects millions around the world. Executive producer and star Zendaya says their goal is not to be role models,...

The Film

The new Miyazaki. That’s a description I’ve heard applied to Mamoru Hosoda over and over, and it’s never sat well with me. Notwithstanding that Hosoda has expressed critical feelings about Miyazaki’s depiction of women, or my own apathy about Miyazaki’s films, Hosoda isn’t the new anybody, nor does he need to be. He’s the first Mamoru Hosoda, and across his six solo features, he’s established a strong authorial voice and, for my money, stands out as one of the best and most exciting filmmakers working today, and not just in animation.

Belle, like Hosoda’s previous films, takes a gigantic sci-fi concept and boils it down to a tiny personal story. The setting is contemporary, but the internet seems to be dominated by an app called U, a social network which, through body sharing technology (think a less gross take...

U is the world’s biggest internet community and ethereal singer Belle is its brightest star. From the moment she burst onto the virtual scene, lovers and haters Irl and inside U have been consumed with learning the pink-haired pop icon true’s identity.

17-year-old Suzu (Kaho Nakamura) is horrified by Belle’s success. Devastated by the loss of her beloved mother, the weight of grief has stolen Suzu’s confidence and her voice from her. The act of singing now makes her ill and she has withdrawn from her father and closest friends to mourn alone.

Escaping into U was an act of desperation but the site’s biometric tech draws out its users’ inner strengths and gifts so once inside Suzu couldn’t help giving voice to her pain. Her plaintive song was raw and real and a host of avatars gathered to listen. Checking her phone back...

This weird postmodern drama sees a lonely teenager join a virtual world where she becomes a hugely successful singer

There’s some amazing big-screen spectacle in this weird postmodern emo photo-love drama from Japanese anime director Mamoru Hosoda, whose previous film Mirai elevated him to auteur status. Suzu, voiced by Kaho Nakamura, is a deeply unhappy and lonely teenager at high school, who lives with her dad. Her mum died some years ago, attempting (successfully) to save a child from drowning and Suzu can’t come to terms with the zero-sum pointlessness of this calamity: a total stranger was saved but her mother died. Or not zero in fact: while her loss increased the sum-total of unhappiness, the most popular boy in school – a friend since they were little – is tender and protective towards Suzu.

Her life is complicated further when she is persuaded to join a virtual reality meta-universe called U,...

Under Childhood is a column on children’s cinema—movies about and for kids.Mamoru Hosoda’s Belle is an anime musical that reimagines the story of Beauty and the Beast as two teenagers whose paths cross on a virtual reality platform, where both appear as their respective online personas—one a pink-haired pop star with a stirring voice, the other a wolf-like monster covered in bruises. Surreptitious meetings between the two provide some respite from their somber physical reality. But a slew of online and offline threats circumvent the chance for a deeper bond to develop. The desire for a multidimensional friendship sets the film into motion. The release of Belle arrives in the middle of a rather historic moment in which many screen-mediated childhood experiences are not only more ubiquitous but also mandatory, even state-mandated. For many children, the pandemic has made being online a requirement for participation in public and private spheres,...

Here in the US movie audiences have embraced animated features based on fairy tales for well over eighty years when Walt Disney gambled on the story of Snow White and her seven forest pals. And how do they travel overseas? Very well indeed as many foreign lands contributed to the wealth of animated fable features. Now comes a new take on a much-beloved story that the “mouse house’ tackled over thirty years ago. No, it’s not another “live-action” retelling as the Disney Studios did in 2015. The master film artisans of Japan have put an interesting high tech “spin” on it, but it’s not a CG effort, like a Pixar flick. This is somewhat futuristic with the same themes of swooning romance between a reviled creature and the beauty known as Belle.

Before the love story properly commences, we’re given a short prologue, a primer on the virtual...

With “Belle,” anime master Mamoru Hosoda has reimagined “Beauty and the Beast” for the metaverse set — that young generation of social media users who switch identities comfortably between the physical world and a more inviting online one.

Roughly half the movie takes place in the “real world”, while the fairy-tale portion is set on an ultra-popular virtual platform called “U,” where the main character appears as a slender pink Disney princess type: Belle.

In U, members assume an alternate identity/avatar (or “As”) that allows them to more fully express certain dimensions of their personalities. Here, Hosoda appears to have tapped into a central anxiety of modern adolescence: the concern that others could never truly know or accept all of one’s nuances and contradictions, just as in nearly every telling of this classic story, only Belle can see the goodness in the Beast.

For more than 20 years, Hosoda has...

When director Mamoru Hosoda selected Eric Wong to design the virtual world in his movie Belle, Wong was still working a full-time job at an architectural practice. But he wasn’t going to let that get in the way of working with one of his favorite directors.

In Belle, Suzu (Kaho Nakamura), a shy high school student, becomes a global superstar when she sings in the fantastical virtual world of “U.” When a mysterious “beast” disrupts one of her shows, Suzu goes on a journey to discover who he is and save him from a gang of vigilantes.

The world of “U,” designed by Wong, is an industrial city with a twilight sky ever-present in the background. Wong used his experience as an architect to create the city as a tessellating metropolis of skyscrapers to contrast the magical surrealism of the characters.

Deadline: What was your inspiration for the architecture?...

One of this year’s animated Oscar contenders could be veteran Mamoru Hosoda’s dazzling Cannes debut “Belle: The Dragon and the Freckled Princess”, inspired by the French “Beauty and the Beast” fairy tale, about rural school kids who take on alter egos in a digital universe, based on their strengths and weaknesses. “Belle” could mark the filmmaker’s second animated feature Oscar nomination after “Mirai.” The movie screens October 23 at Hollywood’s Animation Is Film festival before its later Oscar-qualifying GKids release.

Hosoda updates the 18th-century fairy tale that has spawned countless movie adaptations, from Jean Cocteau’s 1946 black-and-white French classic to the Disney animated musical and its recent live-action remake, with a near-future story that combines “Ready Player One” with “Eighth Grade.” The movie’s naturalistic setting is the filmmaker’s birthplace Kamiichi, a remote western island.

“It’s a very rural place,” Hosoda said. “It’s a...

One of this year’s animated Oscar contenders could be anime veteran Mamoru Hosoda’s dazzling Cannes debut “Belle”, inspired by the French “Beauty and the Beast” fairy tale, about rural school kids who take on alter egos in a digital universe, based on their strengths and weaknesses. “Belle” could mark the filmmaker’s second animated feature Oscar nomination after “Mirai.” The movie screens October 23 at Hollywood’s Animation Is Film festival before its later Oscar-qualifying GKids release.

Hosoda updates the 18th-century fairy tale that has spawned countless movie adaptations, from Jean Cocteau’s 1946 black-and-white French classic to the Disney animated musical and its recent live-action remake, with a near-future story that combines “Ready Player One” with “Eighth Grade.” The movie’s naturalistic setting is the filmmaker’s birthplace Kamiichi, a remote western island. “It’s a very rural place,” Hosoda said. “It’s a part of Japan that is dying away.

If a name can trigger nostalgia, don’t be surprised when the occasional sense of deja vu sets in while watching Belle, a dazzling near-future tech fantasia wrapped around a tale, yes, as old as time. Directed by Mamoru Hosoda and mostly set in a vast online world of sweeping musical numbers and weightless action sequences, it tells of Suzu, an awkward teenager (as if there were any other kind) who finds quick fame performing as the pop-singer Belle: her avatar on a hugely popular social media platform called U that looks like a sugary cocktail of Tik Tok and “The Oasis” from Spielberg’s Ready Player One.

Belle is the most ambitious work yet from Hosoda, a filmmaker who—along with contemporary Makoto Shinkai, director of the massively successful Your Name—has for quite some time been touted as heir apparent to Hayao Miyazaki (though Hosoda tends to balk...

(or at least the Disney version of it), as “Miraï” director Mamoru Hosoda pushes his boundless imagination to new extremes in a visually dazzling musical about how J-Pop can save the world. If that seems like too much ground for a cartoon to cover in the span of a two-hour coming-of-age story, keep in mind that Hosoda has a knack for reaching familiar places in rivetingly unexpected fashions. Case in point: The heroine of “Belle” enters the movie atop a flying humpback whale that’s barnacled with hundreds of stereo speakers.

It’s a fitting introduction to a film that wows you with its wild vision of internet age identity even when it doesn’t reveal anything that isn’t already self-evident. But Hosoda is a born maximalist with a big heart, and while his most ambitious moonshot to date isn’t quite able to arrange all of its moving...

Belle Ryu to Sobakasu no Hime International Trailer — Mamoru Hosoda‘s Belle: Ryu to Sobakasu no Hime (2021) international movie trailer has been released by Toho. The Belle Ryu to Sobakasu no Hime international trailer stars Kaho Nakamura, Rina Izuta, Tina Tamashiro, Koji Yakusho, Shota Sometani, Ryo Narita, Kenjiro Tsuda, Mamoru Miyano, Toshiyuki [...]

Continue reading: Belle (2021) International Movie Trailer: Suzu reinvents herself on the Internet in Mamoru Hosoda‘s Anime Film...

"Nobody would think that Belle is a country bumpkin like you." Charades, French distributor of this film, has released a new trailer for Belle from acclaimed, award-winning Japanese animation director Mamoru Hosoda. We've already posted a few Japanese trailers for this already, and it's expected this will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival this summer. The animated adventure is about a teenage girl who lives between modern-day Japan and a virtual world called "U." The story follows her as she makes a new friend and "embarks on a journey of adventures and love both in their quest of becoming who they truly are." With a voice cast including Kaho Nakamura, Kenjirô Tsuda, Mamoru Miyano, Kôji Yakusho, Toshiyuki Morikawa, and Ryô Narita. I'm really looking forward to this! As magical as ever from Hosoda. Jump in. Here's the first international trailer (+ ...