A press conference on the completion of the latest film directed by Mamoru Hosoda, ” Ryu to Soba Kasumi no Hime, ” held at Grand Hyatt Tokyo on July 6th revealed that actor Takeru Satoh (live-action Rurouni Kenshin, Bakuman, Ajin) plays the mysterious entity that is the “Dragon” in the film.

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Director Hosoda, Kaho Nakamura as Suzu/Belle, Ryo Narita as Shinobu Hisatake, Shota Sometani as Shinjiro Chikami, and Tina Tamashiro as Ruka Watanabe participated in the completion report interview.

Hosoda, who has dealt with the Internet as a theme in his past works “Digimon Adventure: Our War Game!” and “Summer Wars” mentioned that he chose the theme of “real world and the virtual world of the Internet” in Belle. In the movie, he tried to put forward the relationship between virtual reality and actual reality since the creation of the Internet about 25 years ago.

He revealed that his inspiration was the France based movie “Beauty and the Beast ” from the 18th century. The central idea was to think about how that movie can be expressed via the Internet in Japan and what kind of love story it will turn out to be.

When asked to comment on the movie, Nakamura, who is usually active as a musician said that the movie is very overwhelming. It’s a world view that depicts the Internet world, what Hosoda is surely good at, but the way he has expressed it is very new.

There is no doubt, from the trailers as the other panel members have also agreed that the artwork combined with Nakamura’s singing has elevated the movie to a new level.

As an end word from the Director, Hosoda said that the movie is a package of a lot of elements- there is love romance, there is action, there is suspense, and there is an interesting element of entertainment. And this is a product of lots of research and hard work that anyone can enjoy.

The full interview is available on Comic Natalie Website.

Source: Comic Natalie