Makoto Shinkai’s Suzume Review: Messy and Unfocused Yet Compelling and Beautiful
For the past couple of months, I’ve been writing a retrospective series of articles respectively focusing on each of the previous short films and full-length movies written and directed by Japanese animator Makoto Shinkai. Following his tentative first steps into the industry with the essentially-single-handed production of both She and Her Cat and Voices of a Distant Star, Shinkai’s power and influence in the industry gradually grew until he released international megahit your name. This whimsical romantic fantasy/disaster movie put him within the sights of the moviegoing mainstream, and he’s now one of the few anime directors that Western film critics can name without first hitting up wikipedia.
your name. was a crystalisation and refinement of Shinkai’s pet themes — intense teenage love and longing, usually frustrated by time, space, or some other insurmountable barrier. Along with his trademark hyper-realism, eye-popping cloudscapes and masterful use of vibrant colour, Shinkai made your name. a titanic example of the power of Japanese animation — both exotic yet familiar, melancholy yet humorous. His follow-up Weathering With You featured similar themes and while it also made staggering volumes of money, it was not welcomed quite as warmly by fans or critics as his prior masterwork had been.
Now Shinkai returns with his third full-length natural-disaster-filled blockbuster in a row, completing what now appears to be a loose thematic trilogy. Suzume is his most stark examination yet of the catastrophic event inspiring and haunting all three movies — 2011’s devastating Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, the worst in recorded Japanese history, and the fourth-worst in recorded world history. The after-effects of this tragedy reverberate in Japanese collective consciousness to this day, and for some, especially those who lost loved ones amongst the 20,000 dead, or lost homes to the terrifying deluge of water, the pain remains a fresh wound. I covered some of the background to this event in my look back at 2011’s anime, and my fellow AniTAY writer Protonstorm also covers the topic of Japan’s disaster response in his own Suzume review.
The titular Suzume Iwato is our seventeen-year-old protagonist, a former resident of the Tohoku area who was orphaned as a small child by the tsunami twelve years prior to the movie’s setting. Now living in Kysushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands, she is cared for by her single aunt Tamaki, her mother’s younger sister, who adopted her as her own daughter following the disaster.
By chance one morning on the way to school, Suzume meets and is entranced by a mysterious, older, long-haired bishonen (beautiful boy) who asks the way to the nearest “abandoned area with doors”. Intrigued by this, she follows him to the nearby ruined onsen (hot spring) resort and in the midst of a wide open area she finds a door in its frame, standing unsupported. Like a modern-day Pandora, she can’t help but open the door, and she discovers it’s a portal to a starry-skyed twilight realm — the “Ever-After”. After accidentally dislodging an odd cat-shaped “keystone”, Suzume unwittingly unleashes disaster on her hometown as a massive, red, snake-like beast erupts from the doorway (that only she can see) and crashes down on her town, causing earthquake damage to the buildings.
Together she and the boy (named Souta) struggle to close the door and prevent further damage. Unfortunately, they learn that due to Suzume’s actions she has freed the keystone/guardian deity/trickster god that previously ensured that “the worm” did not escape from the Ever-After to cause destruction to Japan. This god, which manifests itself as a cute little talking cat, names itself “Daijin”, turns Souta into a small yellow children’s stool missing one of its legs, and warns/threatens Suzume that unless she chases him, similar doors will open across Japan and cause worse disasters than what she witnessed in her home town. So begins a somewhat bonkers road trip across Japan as an exasperated schoolgirl chases a sentient chair chasing a talking cat hunting magical portals through reality that unleash (un)natural cataclysms on the mundane world.
At least that’s how the first section of the film progresses, as Suzume and chair-Souta are led further and further north by the mischievous Daijin (who becomes something of a social media/Instagram star due to his exploits). First she takes a ferry to the island of Shikoku, then on to Honshu and Kobe and finally to Tokyo where Suzume and Souta must attempt to prevent a recurrence of the 1923 great Kanto earthquake that almost destroyed Tokyo. During this event, Daijin reveals his true intentions regarding chair — Souta, and Suzume’s focus changes to rescuing her new friend from a fate worse than death.
This change in focus does send the plot spiralling sideways, and is reliant on the audience accepting Suzume’s emotional attachment to a guy she barely met two days previous, who for most of the time they have interacted has been in the form of a chair. Thankfully this supposed romance is barely a focus of the movie, as it is never particularly convincing. Let’s also not forget the reasonably significant age gap between them (though it’s not so marked as in Shinkai’s other age-gap romance film The Garden of Words.)
Plot progression is also reliant on circumstance and random chance, with Suzume bumping into helpful people along the way who provide her with food and support, presuming she’s either a runaway teen or on some kind of journey of self-discovery (neither option is particularly incorrect). It’s something of a shaggy dog story where it’s best not to think too closely about the details. In common with the last two Shinkai movies, the plot is leavened by frequent, welcome humour, something sorely missing in his early work.
Eventually aunt Tamaki catches up, and her chemistry with Souta’s fellow teaching student friend, the laid-back Tomoya Serizawa, is a particular highlight. The shared journey dredges up Suzume’s internalised struggle to feel accepted by her aunt — she worries that Tamaki sacrificed her own chances at a normal happy life for Suzume’s sake, and one powerful scene all but confirms Tamaki’s negative feelings. Families are painful, but also resilient, and Suzume explores its titular character’s deep feelings of loss, grief and disconnection in a fantastical but resonant way. When their journey finally takes them back to where everything began — Suzume’s devastated home town in the Tohoku area — there’s a deeply unsettling scene featuring a redacted child’s diary that really struck a chord with me.
Shinkai’s previous work is rightly lauded by critics for its sheer aesthetic beauty, and Suzume’s presentation is no less stunningly beautiful. Particularly noteworthy are the tense action scenes set in the haunting, abandoned places, where Suzume struggles desperately to close the magic doors before terrible catastrophes ensue. Probably the most impressive scene is when the giant worm spreads its fractally-proliferating body across Tokyo’s skyline, all blood-red apocalyptic swirls and shadow. It’s like something out of a vivid nightmare, and it does make me wonder if perhaps Shinkai is prone to eating too much cheese before bed. Such spectacular visuals are spread liberally throughout the movie, and I struggle to think of any other living animation director whose imagery can match this film’s visual power.
Although Shinkai himself dislikes journalists’ lazy comparison of him to famed studio Ghibli director Hayao Miyazaki (and I would tend to agree — the deliberate homage of Children Who Chase Lost Voices excepted, Shinkai’s films are very different to Miyazaki’s), the one thing they have in common is a reluctance to feature wholly evil antagonists. Despite Daijin’s sometimes demonic appearance, and the fact he is the closest thing to an enemy that Suzume has, Shinkai later recontextualises his role in a sweet, almost heartbreaking way. At times a pathetic, starved-looking runt, at other times cheerfully posing for photographs or grinning sinisterly, his eyes glowing with unearthly glee, Daijin is a highlight of the movie. I almost want a cat of my own now.
Suzume herself is a strong protagonist — ready to drop everything and run to fix the problems she feels are her responsibility, she harbours unresolved trauma that the film handles in a sensitive way. I particularly liked the ending and its subtle time-bending bringing her story full-circle. I also liked that the barely-developed romance was not the focus of the conclusion, merely a single aspect of it. We get as much closure as (if not more than) one should expect from any Shinkai movie, with little in the way of unresolved story threads. The conclusion is undoubtedly more satisfying than Weathering With You’s, and is almost on par with your name.’s.
Once again, Japanese rock band Radwimps provide the score, accompanied by composer Kazuma Jinnouchi. Suzume’s theme, provided by Radwimps and sung by Toaka is a gentle, breathy and evocative lullaby that gradually builds in power to an emotional crescendo with backing choir voices arranged to trigger goosebumps with almost surgical precision. It’s hardly a surprise that the music is fantastic — Shinkai pays as close attention to his scores as his imagery — he’s never made a poor-sounding movie yet.
Shinkai is often accused by anime fans of making the same film over and over again, and there is some merit to this criticism, but I feel in the case of Suzume this is unfair. Of course there are significant similarities to his two preceding movies in terms of natural disaster subject matter, and there is a central teen romance frustrated by circumstance — but that romance is so peripheral to the story that it barely compares to your name. or Weathering With You. Certainly, this is a completely different type of film to The Garden of Words or 5 Centimeters per Second. Suzume keeps the trimmings of Shinkai’s previous works, but the meat is elsewhere, with Shinkai’s knife incising and excavating the trauma of a generation. It’s a gorgeous and important film that deserves to be enjoyed and experienced on its own merits, and it gives me confidence that Shinkai will continue to grow and develop as the anime director to watch for in future.
Suzume no Tojimari (litrally: Suzume’s locking up)
Written, edited and directed by: Makoto Shinkai
Produced by: Koichiro Ito and Genki Kawamura
Music by: Radwimps, Kazuma Jinnouchi
Studio: CoMix Wave Films
JP cinematic release: 11th November 2022
UK/NA cinematic release: 14th April 2023
Distributor: Crunchyroll
Languages: Japanese audio with English subtitles, English audio
Runtime: 122 minutes
BBFC rating: PG
