Well, my cybertavern
patrons, we finally come to the last of Mamoru Hosoda's animated
films. It's been a real treat looking back at such an
under-appreciated creative talent that doesn't get nearly as much
love as he deserves. So let's finish this whole thing off with a bang
with the martial arts drama, The Boy and The Beast.
The first thing that
really struck me about the marketing and tone of this movie is how
more upfront masculine and testosterone-filled it is. The Girl Who
Leapt Through Time was about a young woman dealing with a
transitional period in her life, both as a woman and as a person.
Wolf Children was about a woman becoming a mother and seeing her
children grow up while guiding them as best as possible. Summer Wars
may have had a male lead, but he was a socially awkward math geek who
accidentally kicked off one of the major conflicts and was then
tasked with fixing his mistake. This is what makes his filmography so
unique from a gender studies perspective, but it's what helps give
The Boy and the Beast the sensation of being something unique from
this director, even if the actual movie itself treads familiar
ground.
But it seems that
Hosoda's film style and habits actively go against the movie here,
leading to what I consider to be his worst, by default, cinematic
outing.
But first, the let's
recap the story. The movie starts with a young boy running away from
home, lost and wandering through one of the busier districts of
modern Japan. He has a lot on his mind since his mother recently
passed away and he just escaped from protective services wanting to
put him with a different part of his family that he hates. In this
bitter and hateful bit of anger, the boy accidentally stumbles upon
some sort of entrance to another world hidden in the district's back
alleys, which takes him to an entirely different world full of
anthropomorphic animal characters.
It is here that he
meets Kumatetsu. A large, aggressive, brash and abrasive bear-man
that decides to take the boy in and train him in martial arts as an
apprentice. The problems of course are the boy is stubborn as hell
and Kumatetsu is a terrible teacher, which leads to a lot of humorous
but relatable squabbles between the two characters.
Why does Kumatetsu
want to train this kid? Well turns out if you're a native of the
beast world and manage to become a complete martial arts master, you
can ascend to a higher plane and achieve something like godhood or
enlightenment, a feat the world's elder is about to achieve. As such,
there is a massive debate as to who will take the elder's place as
leader, which has lead to a heated competition between Kumatetsu and
another more disciplined boar-man. A boar-man that has an entire
school of students and is seen as a more presentable and likeable
person compared to our short-fused underdog protagonist. The idea
being that if Kumatetsu can help train this boy into a martial arts
prodigy, it would help him in his goal of defeating his rival in an
upcoming martial arts competition to decide who will take place as
leader.
And for the first
half of the movie, this set-up works perfectly fine. We have a rough
and tumble duo of main characters that get on each other's nerves but
in an endearing way. We have some great visual storytelling and
martial arts philosophy being presented. And of course the central
conflict is whether or not the training and guidance by Kumatetsu and
the rest of the cast will help him cope and ultimately get through
his trauma while becoming stronger for it.
On paper this is not
a bad idea at all for a movie. Mamoru Hosoda knows when to let a
scene breathe and let the beautiful animation sell the emotional
state of the characters, but also knows how to direct kinetic action
and fast-paced drama. The visual storytelling is also surprisingly
poignant. The beast world has the same atmosphere and style of a
Wuxia movie, but they also spend a lot of time discussing how they
don't fight to kill, murder, or conquer, that it's all about the
competition and the self-improvement. How do they choose to visualize
this? By having the major battles we see happen with the fighters
using sheathed swords. Not just kept to the hip either, they actively
strike each other with the swords still in their scabbards. I wish I
could come up with a better metaphor than that.
I even really like
how the two main heroes eventually grow to like each other. As I said
before, Kumatetsu is not a great traditional teacher, there's even a
hilarious sequence where he's trying to teach the kid proper sword
stance and he just can't find the right words for it, but how the kid
goes about learning from him is legitimately clever and endearing.
So why do I think
The Boy and The Beast doesn't totally work? Well the first major
issue I find is the pacing. I've mentioned before that Mamoru Hosoda
has a habit of breezing through complex ideas and concepts, letting
the visual storytelling fill in the blanks. The mechanics of time
travel in Girl Who Leapt Through Time, how OZ works in Summer Wars,
etc.. Normally this is acceptable since there is a solid amount of
information density in those scenes, these are movies that understand
and respect a film's capacity to express without speaking, and it
stops the movies from getting bogged down in tedious exposition.
In The Boy and The
Beast, this doesn't really work because the movie isn't rushing
hand-wavey science fiction ideas or concepts; it is breezing through
diverse and complex martial arts philosophy. A great example of this
is a section in the movie where the duo seek the wisdom of several
martial arts masters in order to understand true strength. And within
five minutes they are hit with multiple religious and conceptual
ideas of true strength. Strength is an illusion, strength is
patience, strength is pointless, the list goes on. None of this is
brought up again and the characters ultimately take nothing from the
experience. No scenes of deep thought, no discussion, just, “well,
that was pointless.”
This also leads to a
problem with the movie's final act. The entire second half of the
movie takes place after a several year-long time jump and the boy discovers a
way back to the human world. Once again, Mamoru Hosoda does not miss
a beat when it comes to the human element here. The boy doesn't know
how to read for example, so he winds up meeting a nice woman at a
library and they slowly bond over their impromptu reading lessons.
All of this happening much to Kumatetsu's chagrin since he's grown to
be protective of the kid and all.
Now if the movie
simply ended with the kid becoming a better human being and it
turning into a narrative about foster parenthood and familial bonds
transcending worlds, The Boy and The Beast could have become
something genuinely special. Instead, the climax becomes the very
definition of forced. There's a big grand evil that comes out of
nowhere and threatens both the human world and the beast world and
the minute it arrived my enthusiasm went into the toilet. It doesn't
fully work, in some ways it goes against the character arcs in the
movie, and it is so awkwardly thrown in it hits with the impact of a
wet rag.
In order to explain
it in its entirety I'll have to pull off a first and put up a spoiler
alert. If you still have an interest in seeing this movie to complete
your Hosoda collection, I think my thoughts are documented well
enough, but if you don't care and want to see where I'm going with
this, venture on.
Alright, as I
mentioned before when the movie starts the boy is angry and bitter
towards the world. The movie decides to visualize this by having his
negative emotion manifest as some sort of shadowy entity that is then
quickly forgotten since we need to establish the beast world and his
relationship with Kumatetsu. Fast-forward to the movie's second half
during the big martial arts match and it is revealed that the boy's
hatred for humanity, which he has long since grown out of, has taken
control of another minor character, the boar-man's kid, and has begun
twisting him into some aggressive and angry person, there's even a
scene where he unsheathes a sword and uses it to mortally wound one
of the major characters. Why did it affect him like this? Because the
kid is also a human that the boar-man adopted but kept in the dark
about his human nature. From there, this character turns into some
sort of crazy force of nature that starts wrecking Japan, which is
only stopped when the boy unsheathes a blade for the first time in
his life and cuts him down in what is an otherwise emotionally
gripping climax.
I say otherwise
because these two characters never interact with one another in any
meaningful way until this finale. There's a snippet of dialogue here
and there, but otherwise nothing. An entire hour of screentime goes
by and it's just a set-up at the beginning, then a rushed reveal in
the final act. On the one hand this is supposed to be the conclusion
to the kid's arc, him conquering his literal dark side with the
discipline and strength gained by his training and his newfound
friendships. On the other hand, this entire world emphasized the
improvement of the self and the strength of letting go of hateful
thought, they even go out of their way to explain that human beings
inherently find such a thing difficult, only to have the kid kill
someone else who was influenced by his dark thoughts for no
adequately explained reason.
I don't mean the
whole fact that this character started terrorizing everyone, I mean
this negative emotion should have come back to the kid himself, not
latch itself on to another person. That would have made the message
more clear, “I was angry before but I've conquered myself.” As it
stands now the message reads, “human beings are inherently angry
and violent creatures and it only ends when they kill each other, no
exceptions.” Even if you wanted a more external conflict, the
conclusion should have been more emotionally driven, have the two
characters come to an emotional head rather than just turning into
something as simple a hero needing to put down a monster.
Problematic? Yes. A
bit rushed and kind of falls apart near the end? A bit. Still full of
heart and tender moments along with some well-animated action and
character moments? Have you read any of my past reviews on this guy?
I say give it a look if you're willing to overlook some flaws.
Otherwise, this is a noble misstep by an otherwise impressive talent
that I'm glad I saw once but won't be revisiting any time soon.
And that is the last
movie by Mamoru Hosoda to date. I really do want to continue doing
Animation Deviation since it helps stretch my legs with something
other than talking about video games, but I really don't have a
concrete plan going forward.
So I'm giving the
power to choose to you! My readers! Do me a favor and follow me on
Twitter @DarthRahu cuz I'm gonna be holding a poll really soon about
other directors to be subjects for Animation Deviation.
Until then, I have
some other ideas in mind to fill this slot so don't worry, more
content is still a-comin'
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