On the basis of such previous works as Your Name and Weathering with You, Japanese animator Shinkai Makoto has found himself compared by many to no less a figure than the great Hayao Miyazaki with some suggesting that he could well be that master’s heir apparent. Living up to such a comparison might be a challenge for most normal filmmakers but in Shinkai’s case, it seems to have given him further inspiration because his latest work, Suzume, demonstrates the kind of formal beauty and evocative storytelling that are hallmarks of Miyazaki’s work while at the same time demonstrating a gentle, offbeat nature that is all its own.
The central character here is Suzume (Nanoka Hara), a teenaged girl who has been living with her aunt since the death of her mother in an earthquake a decade earlier. Out for a walk one day, she crosses paths with Souta (Hokuto Matsumura), an odd young man who seems to be in search of a seemingly random door. Intrigued, she follows him to an abandoned lot where there does appear to be a door standing in the middle of nowhere. When she opens it—she must, after all—she witnesses a magical world known as The Ever-After but also unwittingly unleashes an evil and destructive force known as the Worm that seeks out open doors such as these to pass through in order to unleash destructive havoc on our world that, since most people cannot see the swirling red tendrils in the sky that it resembles, are usually written off as earthquakes.
Souta, as it turns out, is charged with going around to find such doors and close them before the Worm can pass through them with the help of a “keystone.” Alas, while explaining all of this to Suzume, a weird series of events occur that transform the all-important keystone into a talking cat named Daijin (Ann Yamane) and entrap Souta’s spirit inside of a chair that Suzume’s mother made for her long ago. Although Souta can still talk and move despite being reduced to the form of a child’s chair, that isn’t much of a help when it comes to traversing the countryside to save the world and so Suzume—carrying Souta along with her—sets off to try to track down the wily Daijin and find and seal the doors before the Worm can get to them.
I don’t really want to say too much about what transpires from this point because a lot of the fun comes from the oddball twists and turns of Suzume and Souta’s quest to find the doors and stop the Worm—the journey is all-important and can be read on any number of metaphorical levels (primarily about the emotionally fraught journey from the relative freedoms of adolescence to the responsibilities of adulthood) but includes enough weirdo elements (such as the presumed romantic interest spending most of the film in the form of a chair) to keep it from becoming too heavy and portentous. More importantly, he is able to make the stranger elements fit within the context of the story—as silly as having a chair as a key character may sound in theory, Shinkai, along with his animatiors and sound designers, have made him into a fully convincing and unexpectedly expressive character that plays beautifully off of Suzume. Admittedly, the story doesn’t quite come together in the end as neatly as one might hope but, to be fair, I am not entirely certain how a film with such disparate elements could end in a completely satisfying manner.
Visually striking and dramatically evocative in equal measure, Suzume is a wonderfully effective animated epic that confirms Shinkai Makoto as one of the more striking and unusual talents working in film today. Although some of the elements might prove to be a little too intense for younger viewers, it is otherwise a perfect film for the entire family to enjoy that puts feature-length commercials like Super Mario Brothers to shame. As has been the case for the last few years, 2023 will no doubt see a flood of animated films hitting the multiplex. While I suppose that a better one could emerge at some point, Suzume is currently the one to beat.