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By the time this post comes out it will probably already have been about a week or so since the last teaser for Mamoru Hosoda’s newest feature film “Belle” has come out. However, being the fan of his that I am, I still wanted to react to it and give my initial, albeit ill-informed take on what has been released so far.

The reason I say ill-informed is cause, well, as far as I can tell, there is still relatively little information about the movie as a whole, outside of a general plot layout. The addition of a few more frames in a thirty second teaser does not really add much more to the equation. However, I will say that from the amount that we got, I am incredibly excited.

In terms of modern directors, I feel like Makoto Shinkai gets a lot of credit, deservedly so, for the visuals of his movies. Yet, it feels like Hosoda never really gets that same credit even though his works are all also visually stunning. “Summer Wars,” for example, not only had an incredibly diverse color palette, but had tons of Sakuga in the final act of the movie. The same can also be said for “Boy and the Beast” which had a number of great fight scenes even down to the final minutes of the movie.

I mentioned this in my last post about the movie, but the limited knowledge we do have implies that movie is not going to be unfamiliar territory. The film’s plot is about a young girl from a rural village who one day joins an online world called “U” and ends becoming a famous singer. People who are familiar with Hosoda’s work might recognize that this is very similar to the plot of “Summer Wars.”

The difference, though, is that “Summer Wars” came out during a time when the internet still felt like a novelty to some people, whereas now it is infinitely more important to communication and daily life. There have also been a lot of burgeoning political movements to come out of the internet in last 10 years, some innocuous, some much more harmful *cough cough* literal nazis *cough cough*

Regardless, this is still all speculation at this point, and nothing concrete can really be said until we see the movie, or at the very least get a longer trailer. However, given the consistent quality of Hosoda over the last decade and half, it would not be surprising to see this movie be another excellent addition to his catalog.

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What do you guys think of this latest teaser for “Belle?” Let me know in the comments below.

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