The Girl With The Dragon In U

GABRIELLE-SUZANNE BARBOT DE Villeneuve’s 18th-century fable Beauty And The Beast gets an update for the social media age in Mamoru Hosoda’s Belle. The story follows Suzu, a shy teenager who finds freedom and confidence in a virtual reality world called U, where her avatar Belle encounters a brooding, tormented loner named the Dragon.

Transformation has been a recurring theme in Hosoda’s work, from the shapeshifting lycanthropes of to the online avatars of . Similarly, his to – but then what is adolescence if not a process of transformation? “I’m interested in how people change, whether it’s their feelings that are changing or their way of thinking,” says Hosoda. “I’m interested in what makes people change, because we can try and change ourselves and it can be very hard unless we have a very powerful experience to actually change us. But children change all the time. Every time they have a new experience, they change, they grow. They’re very dynamic.”