Geek Culture
What We Love About Mamoru Hosada’s Belle Movie
Mamoru Hosoda’s new film, Belle, had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on July 15th, 2021. It was a last-minute rush addition and was announced less than two weeks before its debut. At the festival, Hosoda received a 14-minute standing ovation due to its excellence.
When we first saw Belle, we were moved to tears. It was easy to see why the Film Festival audience was so impressed with it. The question is, what makes Belle so special?
A Film Set in the Present Internet Age
The story follows the heroine Suzu, who starts as a shy high school student. She becomes a participant in the online social media platform called “U” with billions of users. When Suzu becomes one of the most popular avatars on “U,” she meets a violent dragon avatar.
The film straddles with the imaginary and backdrop of the Internet to explore the process of overcoming one’s own demons. Through the story, Suzu finds inner strength and makes the best out of the scary real world, and comes to grips with how the Internet fits in her life.
Her Incredible Flowered Idol Dress
To everyone’s surprise, including hers, Suzu’s avatar becomes a sensation practically overnight with millions of followers. In one of her most beautiful sequences, she’s shown in a floor-length, red gown that’s adorned in red roses, lotuses, and gerbera daisies that float off of her.
As the dress morphs as she sings, the experience can only be described as “magical.” It’s hard to resist the urge to run out of the house and buy flowers just to mimic this part of the movie. If you’re interested in doing so yourself, purchase some from Bouqs discount flower selection.
A Remix on the Beauty and the Beast
The 18th-century French novel La Belle et la Bete (Beauty and the Beast) is effortlessly retold in a modern setting. It’s easy to see the parallels between the character literally named Belle as a stand-in for Belle and the dragon avatar shunned by online society as the Beast.
Mamoru Hosada himself stated that the Disney film “Beauty and the Beast” actually revitalized him and gave him the encouragement he needed to get back into animation. It’s likely that if he hadn’t seen that film, we wouldn’t have Belle, Digimon: The Movie, and Summer Wars.
Stunning Detail Found All Over
The world of “U” is a total feast for the eyes. There are so many screenshots that feature Belle staring across the Internet scape filled with chat balloons and technicolor. Viewers are immediately taken aback by the animation and the quality of the music and voice actors.
Music plays a significant part in Belle, who’s voiced by singer-songwriter Kaho Nakamura. The main theme, “Millenium Parade,” is so incredibly catchy it garnered 2.1 million views 3 days after its official release. The entire voice cast is stellar and brings their A-game throughout.
Technique From a Creative Veteran
Mamoru Hosada has an animation technique that’s immediately recognizable by fans. His 2D design uses cel-shading, which has an absence of shadows. What it does lack in shading, it makes up for bright colors. Over the years, Hosada has added CGI to his repertoire.
Hosada doesn’t follow trends and tries to break the mold where he can. In Belle, he marries hand-drawn 2D with CGI, motion capture, and a bunch of other techniques to create this unique, creative style. The final effect elicits warm, nostalgic feelings no longer found in western films.
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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