Quarantine Control #132: Animal Friends, Ring the Bell
There are some weeks where it’s tough to figure out something original to discuss here, a piece of slightly editorialized info anyone reading may or may not have realized. This is one of those weeks. The world is not in a better state, and it’s difficult to imagine if it ever will be. But there’s nothing truly shocking to comment on this time around.
This means the lede here ended up being about how there was nothing original for the lede. Funny that, huh? Maybe it’s good that there’s little big news to discuss here… for now.
Geoffrey Barnes
Belle (2021)
Source: HBO Max
Episodes: 1 movie
I have a confession to make: I’ve been an anime fan for years, but I’ve never watched a Mamoru Hosoda-directed film. I’d heard about The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Wolf Children, and The Boy and the Beast, but simply never found the time or willpower to sit down and give them a viewing. Now that Belle has made it to HBO Max as a result of the deal between GKids and the streaming service (which could end at any point considering how Warner Bros. Discovery has treated animation lately), I made it my first Hosoda film. All of those beautiful-looking trailers and glowing impressions from the Japanese and western theatrical releases couldn’t possibly steer me wrong, right? Sure… largely.
The story focuses on Suzu Naito, a seventeen-year-old high school student from rural Japan who’s depressed and has low self-confidence. Suzu lost interest in her hobbies of singing and writing songs after a traumatic childhood event, which resulted in her alienating most of her friends and family members. Her life starts changing again after her nerdy and intelligent best friend, Hiroka “Hiro” Betsuyaku, suggests that she play a game called “U,” in which she can create an avatar that represents her to interact with other users and their avatars. It’s within this world as “Bell” that she learns to sing again, which leads to her becoming a quick sensation. The key drama that helps Suzu and those around her happens largely within U, and partially outside it.
There’s a lot I enjoyed about Belle. The trials and travails of high school students don’t appeal to me as much as they used to now that I’m an Old, but Suzu’s problems are portrayed with the kind of realism that anyone among the audience can relate to, especially if they went through somewhat similar growing pains while young. But this more applies to younger people these days, with finding a sort of respite through a virtual world. The tale told within U feels predictable at first, the expected kind with a character called “Bell” in a movie called “Belle.” But it’s a nice story with a worthwhile resolution.
I knew I was in for a treat with an anime movie from Hosoda. This is the first time I’ve sat down to watch one of his films, but I nonetheless knew well that Hosoda’s a popular name. The animation is a treat, yes, but I also enjoyed how it was used. The entire movie is in a 2.35:1 letterboxed aspect ratio, one that’s becoming more common for anime movies between this, the last Rebuild of Evangelion film, and Jujutsu Kaisen 0. Even more noteworthy is how the real world is rendered in 2D animation, while the world of U is in 3DCG. It’s not necessary to tell which events happen in which worlds given the more bombastic aesthetics within U, but both are well animated enough that they segue together well. It’s good 3DCG, is what I’m saying.
Belle tries its best to subvert being predictable, especially through the story that happens within U. But the resolution in the real world, while satisfying, ended up being predictable in a different kind of way. The film shines through how the story reaches its resolution, which gives it a fulfilling end. I was initially wondering why the film garnered the high praise it received as the credits rolled, but Belle is the kind of movie the viewer ponders afterward to realize just how solidly assembled it was. That’s worth enough praise.
Anyway, see Belle in any way you can, even if it might leave for another streaming service as WB Discovery’s new execs thumb their noses at animated works. Perhaps it’s time for me to watch the other Hosoda films, and not get Mamoru Hosoda’s filmography and name confused with Makoto Shinkai, the latter of whom I haven’t seen any movies from either. Forgive me, for I have been a Very Bad Anime Fan.
Joseph Daniels
In documenting television shows with tigers, it does sometimes feel like cheating to include nature documentary shows. But you know what? It’s time to cheat again!
Unlikely Animal Friends
Source: Disney+
Episodes: Unknown; see below
So in trying to find out how many episodes the series has, or even when the series began (Disney+ suggests it began in 2012, but other sites suggest there were two seasons prior to what Disney+ has), I found myself tumbling down several rabbit holes with only my own unlikely animal friend, Rusty, as company. Instead of floating down and touching the ground gracefully, I landed unceremoniously in a heap. After Rusty finished rolling around, laughing at me, she bounded off ahead to scout the area. She’s always been good at that sort of thing whenever we found ourselves in a new situation, so she returned a few minutes later and told me not to expect Kingdom Hearts. I half thought she was going to say not to expect Disney at first, but then remembered that I don’t think I’ve watched any version of Alice in Wonderland with her around. I’ve not had much interest in the new film versions, and the Disney animated version is several decades old at this point.
But that said, I doubt that anything in any of the movies would’ve prepared us for what we were about to see, because it turned out that we weren’t in Wonderland at all, at least not in any capacity I was used to seeing. We were in a vast ocean of blue, yet we were able to walk around, like there were hundreds of paths open to us and we could explore as much as we wanted. “This isn’t what happened the last time we were Narnia’d,” Rusty said to me, and I nodded in agreement.
There were people everywhere along the paths, and I asked someone where I was, but they stayed silent, barely acknowledging me. Then they spoke in a loud voice, but what came out of their mouth was a non sequitur, something wholly unrelated to what I’d asked, and once I’d recovered from the shock of suddenly hearing them shout, I realized that what they said was extremely transphobic. I was going to move on, but then other people started shouting the same thing, moving on down various paths and out of sight. That’s when I started actually listening to what was happening around us. Right before this man – and I should add that this is also when I noticed for the first time that this was as man as white as a plaster wall who wore a very thick beard beneath his chin and had a vacant blank look in his eyes – spoke again in his loud voice, someone else shouted something very racist. Next thing I knew, he repeated the racist diatribe and it went on down the pathways, people parroting what he’d said with no unique input or thoughts of their own. The majority of these people were white, but despite that some of these sudden outbursts were misogynist as well, I noticed a significant number of white women repeating them. Some of them were wearing hats, and for some reason, a lot of the hats were red.
Rusty and I looked around as all this was happening, and Rusty pointed me towards a man who was trying to respond to the bigot conga line. I asked him why he wasn’t just repeating what everyone else was saying and he said to me, “Duty calls. This is important. Someone is wrong on the Internet.” But when I observed this man, he wasn’t refuting them with evidence, he was holding images up in their faces. These images, he would be handed by other people and some of them looked like they’d been worked over several times. Words had been blocked out, others had been put in their place, and the font choices for all of them were atrocious.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “If you’re right and they’re wrong – and I do disagree with their positions on everything they’ve said – why are you acting exactly like they are? You’re just repeating memes that other people came up with.”
In response, he flipped through a fistfull of his images, but looked lost. He had nothing to show me. That’s when I realized that he never spoke to me in the first place, he had just shown me an XKCD comic strip, and I could see it in one of the images he shuffled around as he looked for the right response to what I’d asked him. Apparently, this was something new he’d never had to respond to before.
Rusty and I left the man behind and looked around to see what else we could find, but before we could get five more steps, people suddenly started taking notice of us and began to shout at us. This time, their words started to vary slightly, but they all still said much the same thing. Their name, their occupation, how idyllic and peaceful their lives were, but then they felt maligned by an authority figure and that authority figure needed to go. The pattern was the same, even if the words were slightly different each time. They were trying their best to sound independent of thought, but they had the same blank, far away stare that everyone else had. They were also blaming the authority figure for their own poor life choice, and so Rusty and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes at the same time. “Anti-vaxxers,” we concluded and quickly moved on.
As we wandered, pathways started merging with the one we were on like they were rivers flowing to the ocean, but the shouted messages were moving past us in the opposite direction we walked, like they were fish swimming upstream to spawn. When we made it to the end of our path, we saw someone sitting at a desk, giving a speech. For several minutes, we stood there and endured a number of bad faith arguments and racist assumptions and outright lies and occasionally someone behind us would shout something similar to what the man had said and the shout wound its way back the way we’d come.
The longer we stood there in the presence of such a hateful individual, the more we started to figure out the nature of the place we found ourselves in. We’d actually been walking against the current, not with it. Instead of many tributaries flowing to a larger river, the river was the tributary, flowing into smaller and smaller rivers, sending bad information to all corners of the blue-hued land.
“I’ve had more than enough of this bullshit,” Rusty told me and I agreed and attempted to leave, but then as I turned around, someone thrust life insurance policies in my face. I tried to move past but they were insistent that I listen to what they had to say. I finally pushed them away after about five seconds, only to find that the man at his desk was now in my way, starting to talk about immigration this time. The pathways had disappeared. Rusty’s tail went bushy and I began to feel like I’d stumbled into a trap.
Sure enough, no matter which way I turned, people got in our faces trying to get us to buy stuff, and when we finally got rid of them, the man at his desk began talking about another subject. Occasionally, he was replaced with another man at a different desk, and it was almost always a man, and he would say the most hateful stuff about minorities, or rant about COVID, or insist that his enemies killed babies and ate them and were plotting against him.
Before Rusty and I could get our bearings and figure a way out, one of the men directly confronted us and demanded to know why we were still wearing our masks. At this sudden confrontation, I startled awake and realized my odyssey had just been a dream. I looked over at Rusty, who was sleeping peacefully, and decided I’d tell her later about the dream I had. But after an ordeal like that, I figured that maybe I should just forgo trying to figure out this show’s episode count and year. That way lies madness.
When I first found this show on Disney+, my mind immediately went to the tiger, lion and bear who had been rescued during a drug bust and had been allowed to live together for the rest of their lives. Indeed, in “episode five” of “season one” (there are a large number of reasons why I don’t trust that numbering), this animal trio was featured. Leo the lion, Shere Khan the tiger and Baloo the bear. Wild animal ownership is no laughing matter, but my guess is their original owners wanted the novelty of being able to say they had a lion, a tiger and a bear because of the classic line from The Wizard of Oz. Then, when it came time to name the animals, there weren’t actually any prominent animal stories at the time which featured a lion, a tiger and a bear together. The Jungle Book was probably the closest, as evidenced by the names of the tiger and bear, but Leo got the most generic name you could give a lion. These days, you could probably name each of them after a character from Beastars, but I doubt anyone other than an anime fan would get the reference.
When the episode was put together and aired, all three of these animals were still alive. No one lives forever, not even animals, and Leo and Shere Khan are no longer with us, but their friendship is another example of animals that have learned to get along with each other.
I’ve noticed that a lot of people act surprised when they find out about a cat and a dog living together, but it’s actually pretty common. You never know when animals of different species will take a liking to each other, but a lot of the stories presented in this series are of animals who were introduced to one another at a very young age, so they tend to think of each other as playmates and not as rivals. Or as dinner, in the case of a deer who loves to lick the ears of her lynx friend. It’s actually pretty interesting to me that I’ve seen a lot of examples over the last few weeks of deer loving to lick the ears of felines, like in a YouTube video where a doe just goes to town on a housecat, and the cat lounges there looking very tolerant of this treatment.
It turns out that unlikely friends are everywhere if we just look for them.
There’s little to contribute for the conclusion here either, so let’s just end this. See you all next week. There might be more to discuss by then, but given the state of the world, let’s hope there isn’t.
About The Author
dcstaff
The collective will of the Damage Control staff combined into a single article.
