The Boy and the Beast

[projekktor id=’24182′]

The Boy and the Beast is a Japanese animated adventure written and directed by Mamoru Hosoda. The film held its International premiere at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

Shibuya, the human world, and Jutengai, the animal world… This is the story of a solitary boy and a solitary beast, each of whom lives in one of the two separate worlds. One day, the boy loses his way in the world of the beasts and becomes the disciple of the beast Kumatetsu, who gives him the name Kyuta. Their chance meeting is the beginning of an unbelievable adventure…

“In the film, the boy goes back and forth between the world of animals and the human world,” explains Hosoda. “I created Jutengai, the animal universe, because I wanted non-human characters to judge the world of human beings. Thanks to that look from without, one can better underscore the stranger aspects of our lives, those we pay no attention to because they are so rooted in our daily lives: our constraints, the moments we feel unfree, social conventions …And so some problems that take up so much space in our thoughts will seem relatively simple or hardly important to the characters of Jutengai, who have other points of view, and other ways of approaching things.”

The Boy and the Beast is rated PG.