SPOILERS

The beauty and the beast in scifi.

While Belle works as a great musical it often touches topics that it never explores. The writers clearly show that they thought about a virtual reality and that they actually understand the struggles of it.

At first the VR promises hope and to start over again. In Belle this happens with Suzu not being able to sing in the real world cause of the trauma of losing her mother. She viewed her mother as a role model and the mother taught her -it seems- everything about music.
When the mother died to save another child Belle took it to heart and it seemed to have broken something in her.
But in a VR world she doesn't have to face her fears so she is able to sing there. And she sings beautifully. She is the definition of going viral.

Till this point the story is logical even if not original. It is gorgeous to view at and the music is fantastic. But this is were the movie breaks.
It shows Belles rise to fame and what could happen to a person. Suzu is more interested in the haters than the fans of her, she is more engaged in being critical than appreciating herself. These are modern problems that arise out of social media and the movie touches this well and very understanding. But it drops this plot line completly. Suddenly we have a beast and watch a fairy tale about a beauty and a beast. The story jumps around with no connection, suddenly we are at a concert. The Dragon invades that concert, suddenly fights. Then we jump to a castle while in the real world Suzu is experiencing typical teenage problems. Back to the castle, the beast rejects Belle. I have to admit here my expectations were played but more about that later. We have AIs and digital Castles and a digital Police but they are just vigilante and some weird Gods (the creators of the VR) called Voices. All of this is so much for such a short time that the movie can't go into any of these plotpoints and continues with the story about Belle and the Dragon.
Suddenly the movie changes tone. It's not about romance but domestic abuse and how a bigger brother protects his small brother. This again is a compelling plot line that falls short cause the movie does just not have enough time.

This movie touches many topics that are often unspoken. This is great and I applaud Hosoda for this. All in all its a convoluted mess with no character development that has the right intentions, a beautiful score and a world that just is beautiful even though it stays a complete mistery. All of this movie comes with no explanation or reason. I know movie fans hate this but I believe this would have been better as a show to the likes of Ano Hana. It could have been a masterpiece. I'm still giving it a 7 out of 10 because it does enough right that you cannot hate this movie.

Nice animations and had an interesting concept, but I think the ending was not that uplifting as I hoped [spoiler](when the Dragon/Beast is found out to be a 14 year old with a younger brother to protect from an abusive father, only Suzu goes to Tokyo ALONE to confront him and protect the two children. And said confrontation is just her standing fearless in front of the abusive father, and he just... retreats scared? Then she goes back to her town and the two kids are still left in the care of their father! I mean, I'm pretty sure that is not safe and threw me off quite a bit...)[/spoiler]. The songs are nice, nothing exceptional, but pleasant to hear and see. The U world was a bit of a mess, tho'. There's a romantic interest that you can't quite pinpoint at first between three characters, but then it plays out in a very predictable way.
Also for some die hard Disney fans, there were some scenes that explicitly quoted Beauty and the Beast from the moment Bell/Belle finds the castle.
In short, Belle is a colorful movie about courage and inner strenght, but in the end it feels like it lacks something.

Belle... A collection of music videos glued together by a really badly written narrative.

Belle is one of the weakest animated movies i have seen in the past few years, and that makes me really sad, as a fan of the director i went into this expecting an 8 or an 9, but what i got is a 5 at best.

Belle has a interesting idea, with its reworking of the "beauty and the beast" and its child abuse themes... But it fails to build on its characters and to explain basic premises of its own world, making it for a very boring and bland experience.

Most of the things we thought would be relevant were completely ignored and absolutely useless, we asked ourselves watching "did she get some disease and now is unable to sing in the real world and that is why the U is an escape?" No, they never address this, she just fails to sing and vomits once because the movie wanted to i guess? They keep all her "friends" completely irrelevant and underdeveloped until the last quarter of the movie, so i basically don't care about any of them in the end, they never explain the socio economical structure of the U world... How does this work? They say the avatar is made automatically based on people physiognomy, but the avatars are crazy different in form and species, how can that be made from ones physiognomy? How is the invitation system decided? Who is invited and why? Why even have an invitation system instead of selling the app or freely distributing it if that ends up irrelevant to the story? Why show us a very interesting singer character on the start that rivalizes our belle if you are just going to forget her for the whole movie? How to know which avatars are AI controlled and which are actually people? Is it possible do die in U? If not, what is the relevance of all the conflict we see?

Belle raises too many questions and answer very little, it presents us with an beautiful and interesting virtual world but tells us NOTHING about it and how it all works, it presents us with futuristic technology in a world that seems stuck in the 2000s, it gives us many bland and uninteresting characters with only one personality trait each and develops none of them... There are so many problems, so many drawn out scenes... That it all gets boring and tiresome...

And.... That makes me really sad, the music is GREAT, the visuals are BEAUTIFUL, the music scenes are AMAZING... But they are few and far in between and the rest of the movie... Is not interesting, they present us a nice duality of belle and the beast, but their interest in one another is so out of nowhere and forced that it doesnt feel even a little bit real or natural... There is a great scene that develops the characters and emotional connects, but it is only in the last quarter of the movie... When it has already lost all my interest and attention... and the plot of child abuse is ok and very important... But it feels shoved in... The main plot... Feels shoved in... Oh, and how they find the boy... Well, that was just the worst "investigation" bit i have ever seen...

I really wanted to like this movie, but there are just too many unanswered questions, just too little character development, and a plot that is just generic and bland enough to lose my attention... The visuals and music alone are not enough...

At the end, i feel like they made some really great music videos and didnt want to release it as just animated music videos, so they wrote a really bland movie around it and shoved a controversial and important theme(child abuse) to appeal to peoples hearts in an effective but kinda cheap way.