Writer-director Mamoru Hosoda splits his setting between a rural village and a vast virtual world called U where five billion users have assumed cartoon avatars based on their biometric data.
For our shy 17-year-old heroine Suzu (Kaho Nakamura in the subtitled version I saw, an English dub is also playing), U allows her to become the girl she could have been before she witnessed her mother (Sumi Shimamoto) drown while attempting to save a child from a flooding river.
While Suzu has withdrawn from the real world, she takes to the sky as pink-haired avatar Belle, a confident pop singer whose dazzling performances on the back of a flying humpback whale quickly bring her internet stardom.
While she frets over a crush on her childhood friend at school, in U, she is drawn to a scaly outcast dubbed The Dragon (Takeru Satoh). The pair form a bond which enrages online vigilantes who seek to unmask The Dragon and banish him from U.
This touching, eye-popping animation demands to be watched on the big screen.
Published at Fri, 04 Feb 2022 13:20:00 +0000
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