Gutted I can’t be at the UK premiere of Mamoru Hosoda’s Belle at the London Film Festival tomorrow, although I will be at its Edinburgh screening next week in both personal and avatar form, interviewing the director via Zoom for the post-film Q&A. Topics include animating under covid conditions, the importance of Disney’s Beauty & the Beast in his own artistic inspirations, and what kind of crappy cartoons a world-class animator’s kids force him to watch at home.

In the meantime, you can read my article about the film here at the All the Anime website.

“Hosoda’s own mother died shortly before he completed Summer Wars, after a long illness that lasted for eight years. Her shadow loomed over his next film, Wolf Children, and indeed over Mirai, which examined the degree to which a child could relate to a dead grandparent. Belle, too, obsesses over a lost mother, but also over the opportunities of a digital age.”