The Boy and the Beast (2015)

Ren is a nine-year-old runaway living homeless in Tokyo, adjacent to an unseen world -  the world of beasts, undergoing a leadership change as its Grandmaster steps down and two rivals vie to succeed him. Iouzen, the favourite, is a boar - he's widely-respected with many disciples; Kumatetsu, the underdog, is a grumpy-ill-mannered bear, and he doesn't even have one disciple. On a jaunt in Tokyo, grumbling about how nobody will follow him, Kumatetsu runs into Ren, and offers to take him in, even though he's a human. Ren accepts.

For the first half of the film, Ren remains nine years old - he's self-motivated, scrappy, and engaging. His dynamic with Kumatetsu changes from mutual suspicion to tentative respect - he's incensed when Kumatetsu takes a beating from Iouzen and is the only one who cheers for the underdog. Ren takes over all the household chores, earns his keep, and starts training himself to fight. For his part, Kumatetsu progresses from uncomprehending and gruff dismissal to a delighted appreciation of Ren's willingness to learn. Kumatetsu is essentially childish, which makes his baffled joy when Ren imitates his movements to learn footwork especially gratifying. They're an odd pair of father and son, and the film is at its best when it shows their developing rapport.

The film's clearly about Ren's struggle to reconcile his dual identity of human and beast, but it remains undeveloped beyond the superficial implications of loneliness. An ill-judged time-skip montage in the middle section of the movie takes Ren from nine years old to seventeen years old in five minutes, ending the joy of watching his childhood and his growth. Soon after, he finds a secret way out of the world of beasts and for the next hour, he's busy trying to get back into the world. He befriends a girl at the library who helps him educate himself - he's missed 8 years of school - so he can become a functioning adult. He tracks down his repentant father and reconnects with him. From his character's perspective, these are all good choices which represent development, but the total lack of dramatic tension makes the film sag. The stakes have to be artificially raised by Ren suddenly throwing a tantrum at his father and seeing a black hole of darkness inside himself in a shop mirror, and spiraling into miserable brooding till his friend - Kaede - smacks him and snaps him out of it. 

The problem is, the previous section of the film has steered it towards an offbeat ending, thanks to the deliberate pacing and the lack of clearly-established chronological stakes - it's never clear exactly when Kumatetsu will have to duel Iouzen. So, the sudden revelation of the darkness inside Ren, followed by the same darkness becoming visible in Iouzen's adopted human son Ichirouhiko, both feel like attempts to inject a sense of climax into a meandering narrative. Granted, this has been foreshadowed by the claim early in the movie that humans are dangerous to the beast world because they contain darkness, and by the hints that Ichirouhiko is a human, but the eight-year gap in the middle of the film creates a dislocation and any gradual development of Ichirouhiko's (and Ren's) isolation and resentment is lost. They go from well-adjusted to almost insane in what feels like minutes. Plus, there's no thematic weight to this 'darkness', because we're never told why only humans manifest it and beasts don't. The idea seems to be that it comes out of loneliness or a sense of not belonging, but surely beasts - who think and feel just like we do - would experience that. There's little to connect the vaguely-hinted darkness with Ichirouhiko's full-fledged manifestation of a telekinetic whale-monster in the climax, which comes off as more ridiculous than dramatically earned. 

Like every Mamoru Hosoda film, Beast is a visual delight - colourful, finely-drawn, and fluidly animated. His directorial experiments in the lateral tracking shot (explored here, from his previous work, Wolf Children) and the lovely and engaging, soundtrack adding sorely-needed personality to what is often a staidly conventional film. But they can't rescue it from feeling like two movies in one - a joyful children's movie welded to a misconceived teen drama. In the end, the most engaging part of the film is the first half, despite its lack of ambition. Beast is too simple a film to convincingly explore the perspective of a young adult Ren. It works best when it comes from the perspective of a child filled with wonder, exploring its beautiful world.