A journey through the ‘Hosoda sphere’: digital worlds in Mamoru Hosoda’s animation

ABSTRACT Anime director Mamoru Hosoda’s focus on digital technology, social networks, and the power of online communities is a recurring thematic and visual motif in many of his works, beginning with the forty-minute film Digimon Adventure: Our War Game! (2000), continuing with Summer Wars (2009), and recently resurfacing in Belle (2021). This article traces the aesthetic evolution of Hosoda’s virtual spaces over the past two decades, unpacking the technological, ideological, and stylistic underpinnings and implications of the shift from Digimon’s relative lack of visual sophistication to the sleek speculative architecture of Belle. It puts these digital worlds in conversation with the contemporary digital culture discourses they reflect, examining Hosoda’s sustained engagement with broader societal attitudes towards digital technologies, particularly the internet and social media. At the same time, my analysis focuses on the director’s increasing reliance on digital animation, investigating the relationship between his films’ computer-generated worlds and the animation processes enabling their creation.