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 Where
the wild things are, it’s a question posed in director Mamoru Hosoda’s
The Boy and the Beast and answered by Ren, a sad little boy whose entire
world has shattered. His anguished, angry flight into the center of a
neon-bedecked Tokyo night reveals mysteries and places he could never
have dreamed of.
It
stands to reason that every good leader should have at least one good
apprentice. Someone to assist with the tediums of life. Someone to
cheer and provide moral support for their master. Someone for that
leader to teach all he has learned. What difference does it make,
really, if that apprentice should be of an entirely different species,
as long as the heart and devotion is there? So it goes with Ren, a
young boy heartbroken and bewildered by the sudden death of his mother,
and the very large, bearlike Kumatetsu, a brash streetfighter looking to
raise his profile a bit. There’s something special Kumatetsu sees in
the wounded human boy, and he impulsively offers the child an
alternative to the sad existence without his mother yawning before him.
Ren also sees something in the bearlike, rough-mannered, ill-tempered
beast that he wants to be. Following Kumatetsu through the back alleys
of Tokyo into a world he didn’t know existed, Ren moves into Kumatetsu‘s
shabby, cavelike hut, is given a new name, Kyûta, and devotes himself to
learning whatever he can from the burly creature.
The
Beast Kingdom is a parallel land seemingly out of time and human
comprehension, existing just down the right dark street. Its denizens
seem normal enough with their busy outdoor markets and working folk, but
just a little bit different: Instead of noses, they have snouts. In
place of skin, they are covered in fur. Where humans have hands and
feet, they have hooves and paws. Upright on two legs and perfectly
capable of speech, the creatures are eerily humanoid, yet not. Still,
it was the huge creature’s interest and concern for the runaway waif
that brought Kyûta to this world and so with Kumatetsu is where the boy
will stay, despite the opposing voices of the townspeople, who are
frightened of the human boy and what he might become when no longer a
child.
Kyûta‘s arrival comes at a pivotal time in his new homeland. The Beast
Kingdom’s great Lord is about to retire. This will leave a vacancy for
a worthy candidate to fill and it’s down to two choices. One is the
respected, morally upright and universally beloved Iôzen, while his
opponent, Kumatetsu, is none of those things. The opposites must face
off against each other in a martial arts battle before the entire town
for the office. They have until the Lord of the Beast Kingdom decides
on a departing form into which he will pass his next life, to train for
the big fight. Considering the dotty, will ‘o the wisp nature of the
great Lord, this could – and does – take years.
Throughout this time, the young human boy trains to become as strong and
tough as his master, a desire not helped by Kumatetsu‘s incomprehensible
teaching methods (or utter lack thereof), so Kyûta learns by
watching the beast, clocking and imitating his every move. Eventually,
not only does Kyûta adopt his master’s fighting prowess, but the child’s
entire approach to life is formed by his nearness to the furry fellow as
boy and beast become an unlikely family. The townspeople’s obvious
scorn and disregard for his teacher’s brutish, unvarnished ways, angers
Kyûta, who more than identifies not only with Kumatetsu’s lack of
polish, but his refusal to be tamed; so the new apprentice makes it his
mission to gain some respect for his master. The boy’s devotion to
Kumatetsu and the stunning martial arts skills he acquires over the
years, forces the not only the populace to look at Kumatetsu
differently, but the beast to look at his own life and its meaning in
another way because of the human boy’s involvement in it.
From
his first feature, 2006’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Mamoru Hosoda
showed that he was a rare animator who not only created quality artwork,
both computer generated and hand-drawn, but instilled intelligent and
heartfelt narrative into his stories. With each proceeding film, 2009‘s
Summer Wars, which
was a mind-blowing, visual fiesta, or 2012‘s exquisite, emotionally
heartwrenching, Wolf Children, Hosoda surpassed himself as a director.
All the qualities are here to make The Boy and the Beast a superior
offering: The great premise of a child in a magical, anthropomorphic
Wonderland, finding sanctuary from the tragic reality of his life,
thanks to the rough, surrogate parentage of the gruff Kumatetsu. Hosoda
gives us a tender and sensitive connection that the two wild hearts
share of having each been left alone from a painfully early age. The
martial arts action between the rough Kumatetsu and the genteel Iôzen
that still sees them go to beast mode is meant to up the excitement
ante. We also have the humour and whimsical nature that leavens all
Hosoda projects (I loved that the Beast Kingdom Lord seemed like a
daft but wise, grown-up version of Summer Wars’ King Kazma, as well as
another possible Summer Wars connection later on). The voice acting
is exemplary, with Japan’s great leading man, Kōji Yakusho, audibly
having a great time, taking huge chomps out of the script as the loud,
brutish Kumatetsu. Shota Sometani is more extroverted vocally as the
teenage Kyûta than I’d ever seen the young star onscreen. I also
appreciated the inclusion of seiyuu Kappei Yamaguchi, beloved by me as
the voice of another boy caught between the beast and human worlds in
Inu Yasha. Here, Yamaguchi plays one of the half-wild Kyûta’s furry
friends. And keeping a close eye on the cute, there is the creation of
Chiko, the tiny, rodentine ball of white fluff that is Kyûta’s first
inkling of the Beast Kingdom and his lifelong familiar. I want one!
Sadly,
The Boy and the Beast is somehow the weakest of Hosoda’s films
narratively; having not much more than that initial premise to hold on
to, as the second half of the film, when Kyûta grows into a young man
seeking to discover where he really belongs, feels both rushed and flat.
Stealing back into the world he’d left behind, Kyûta begins to wonder
what human life has to offer and he finds a lot of his answers courtesy
of a young female student called Kaede. Hosoda has previously created
wonderful female characters, both mighty and gentle in each of his
films, yet the insertion of the bland, boring Kaede adds nothing to this
tale. She is really just there to be sort of a do-gooder Jiminy Cricket
for Kyûta’s gradually becoming a real boy. In a painfully clumsy
parallel, ostensibly meant to mirror Kyûta’s time away from other
humans, she talks more about herself and her own loneliness in the
middle of a family that ignores her, than the audience - and one
presumes even Kyûta, a stranger to humankind’s overly tender aches and
pains after so many years - could care about. It is obvious Kaede is
meant to be Kyûta’s first love interest, though no chemistry exists in
our view of them. She is also meant to be the encouragement for him to
stay in the human world, though her arguments as to why he would be
better off struggling in this unfamiliar place, compared to the comforts
of his home in the Beast Kingdom are hollow and trite. Attempting to
adapt Kyûta to life amongst his own seems like more trouble than it’s
worth.
The
movie’s big conflict of a disastrous, otherworldly complication spilling
from the Beast Kingdom into the human world that only Kyûta can fix,
feels jammed in sideways as a further motivation for a tragically weak
last act. Nor is it as interesting as the relationship between the boy
and his beastly parent, which Hosoda seems to short change. A lot of
the connection he spent building between Kyûta and Kumatetsu from the
beginning is sacrificed and their story is actually rushed once the boy
becomes a teenager, possibly to further Kyûta‘s curiosity about his
human life, but that choice cheapens that important bond. We can chalk
it up to teenage rebellion, but the way the development is written makes
Kyûta seem terribly ungrateful for all Kumatetsu and those in the Beast
Kingdom have done for him. That aspect shakes a lot of our
identification with Kyûta’s motivation and risks the boy’s likability,
as well as the heart of the story. So, too, we have to scratch our
heads at the final result, which, while strangely pat, does not play out
at all satisfactorily because it really doesn’t feel like all that’s
come before has been worth it.
While
superior to most American mass-distributed animated features in terms of
its artistry and imagination, for Mamoru Hosoda, The Boy and the Beast
rates lowest on a competitive scale against his own films, so, while
disappointing, that’s still pretty good.
~ The
Lady Miz Diva
March
4th, 2016
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Director Mamoru Hosoda for 2012's Wolf Children.
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