The new animation film of Japanese Mamoru Hosoda juxtaposes splendid scenes graphically and others of a great ugliness.
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In the virtual world of U, carpened as a social network, the avatar of a mysterious singer nicknamed beautiful arouses the craze of millions of users. Under this loan identity is in fact a shy high school student, Suzu, who has trouble overcoming his anxiety as to assert themselves in real life. On u, beautiful makes the meeting of a dark character, the beast, recluse in a castle of pixels dilapidated and considered by the whole network as a paria. Suzu will therefore have cease to discover who hides behind him.
The last feature of Mamoru Hosoda (Summer Wars, the boy and the beast), a figure of the contemporary Japanese animation, consists of a updating in the era of social networks, the famous tale the beautiful and The Beast (1756), Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont, inexhaustible deposit of youth films. With a considerable budget, this new film marks a production jump for the 54-year-old animator, whose primary issue is to appear the extent and the abundance of the digital ocean, structured here as a rack of giant hard disk where float the most fantastic avatars like so many marine species.
Default Patent imaginary
Since he had already demonstrated in Mirai, my little sister (2018), Hosoda is a dualistic filmmaker, for whom the reality and the imaginary oppose without ever meeting. In the beautiful, this opposition is renewed, this time, between the discreet daily of the teenager and his flamboyant existence on the networks. Unfortunately, if the sensitivity of Hosoda is more likely to the representation of the daily life, for which it favors a splendid traditional 2D animation, on the other hand, it fails to give the slightest consistency to the virtual world, characterized by a spill of forms of a Great ugliness, lested by a desire for overload and a poorly integrated use of digital.
The scenes taking place in U show a defect patent of imaginary, an inability to appear ubiquity and digital vertigo. We feel well, in the substance, that Hosoda is a realistic prevented, especially by his ambition to speak to the young generation “digital” in a language and in codes he does not necessarily control.