belle / ryuu to sobakasu no hime

[adevyish]

from the trailer i expected something thoughtful about online celebrity or virtual reality and i got neither. it’s an entertaining enough film, but it makes me want to rewatch durarara s1 for thoughts on the former and .hack//sign for the thoughts on the latter.

thematically it’s all over the place; there’s too many things going on that don’t have much to do with the core message or plot. a few sets of characters could have been merged into others or cut altogether. belle would have done well as a 13-episode anime, but for a movie it’s a couple sideplots and a dozen characters too many.

the music is decent i guess? a couple cutovers were awkward. more jarringly, there’s a key musical motif that is very similar to a pivotal musical moment in gris. it’s not just the motif, it’s the instrumentation that follows it in one instance! music is all derivative etc, but there are also some very loose similarities in the visual design that make me tilt my head and squint.