Review: Suzume (2022)

Makoto Shinkai’s Suzume is defined by three striking, beautifully animated visuals. One is an abandoned door frame that leads to a magical, purple-tinted grove with a billion stars lighting up the night sky. Another is a child’s wooden chair with a missing leg, unable to stand unless propped up against a stable surface. The third is a massive, spectral red worm burrowing out of a hillside and looming over a coastal city like a tempest.

Shinkai’s animated spectacle repeats these visuals throughout the film, as each element is key to the story of his latest supernatural melodrama. But each element is also striking in isolation and proof that Shinkai’s film is a remarkable visual achievement—even if you ignore the story. But you don’t need to provide any caveats with Suzume. This is a remarkable film on all accounts—visually, narratively, conceptually. Suzume is an animated feature where all the elements, from the emotional approach to the contemporary setting to the colourful animation to the supernatural metaphors, are in perfect balance.

The story concerns 17-year-old Suzume (Nanoka Hara), an orphan living with her aunt on the island of Kyushu—the southernmost of Japan’s main islands. Biking to school one day, she runs into a handsome young man, Souta (Hokuto Matsumura), who asks her if she knows of any ruins in the area. She tells him about a nearby abandoned onsen, a hot spring resort, and goes about her day, but the young man sticks in her mind, so she heads to the onsen ruins herself only to find a solitary door frame standing in the middle of a glass dome. She opens the door and sees the purple, starlit grove on the other side, but cannot enter it. With the young man nowhere in sight, she grows frustrated and absentmindedly picks up a nearby cat statue, which turns into a living white cat, speaks to her, and flees.

Baffled, and discounting her experience as a daydream, she heads back to school. But when an earthquake alert goes off on her and her classmates’ phones, she looks out the window to see a massive, spectral red worm winding its way into the sky over the hillside where the onsen ruins lie. No one else can see the worm, but she knows where it’s coming from, so she races to the ruins and finds the young man trying to close the door frame, out of which the worm is escaping. She tries to help him, but the worm falls to the ground, causing an earthquake in the town. Eventually, they shut the door and the worm disappears. Afterwards, Souta explains he’s a “closer,” an individual tasked with closing doors around Japan and stopping this supernatural worm from escaping and causing earthquakes. Suzume takes Souta back to her home to patch him up and the white cat appears, only to transform Souta into the yellow three-legged child’s chair he was sitting on in Suzume’s room.

So begins the film’s adventure narrative, as Suzume and Souta, now a living chair, race across the country to Shikoku, Kobe, Tokyo and beyond in order to catch the white cat, Daijin (Ann Yamane), and close magical doors they come across along the way. The concept is complex, perhaps bordering on convoluted, which explains my overly-detailed description of the film’s set-up. However, nothing is perplexing within the film’s storytelling itself. Every moment feels justified by the character’s emotional needs and borne out of the nuanced development of the protagonists, as well as the supporting characters they meet throughout the film. Every action seems surprising yet inevitable, which is a hallmark of a well-written story.

Eventually, we learn more about the worm and realize the film’s metaphorical approach. For instance, the characters obliquely reference the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, which precipitated the Fukushima nuclear disaster. This weaving together of supernatural elements and real-life disaster imbues the ordinary with mythic quality, and makes the film something of an environmental fable. It also plays into the film’s remarkable gift for portraying characters in complex ways befitting the contemporary setting; this is a story about a supernatural struggle, but it’s also a story about young people living in Japan in the 21st century.

Suzume pays careful attention to ordinary people struggling through their domestic circumstances, despite the film’s focus on grander, literally earth-shattering events. There’s Suzume, who is tortured by the loss of her mother when she was five, as well as Souta, who sacrifices his ordinary life for the sake of this divine calling. On their journey, Suzume and Souta also encounter other richly-detailed characters struggling with the ordinary problems of life. On the island of Shikoku, there’s a teen girl working at her parent’s inn. In Kobe, there’s a single mom running a hostess karaoke bar while caring for her young twins. And, most of all, there’s Suzume’s caregiver, her aunt Tamaki (Eri Fukatsu), who gave up her own adulthood to care for Suzume after her mother’s death.

The subtle romance between Suzume and Satou has dominated much of the film’s marketing approach, but the relationship between Suzume and her aunt is the real heart of the film. It showcases the film’s gentle approach to character and deep well of sympathy for people struggling as they go through the world. When woven together with the high stakes of the supernatural plotting, this contemporary storytelling gives the film a surprising emotional power.

Well, surprising in the moment, but not truly surprising in retrospect. This is a film by Makoto Shinkai, after all, who is as good at emotional climaxes and narrative twists as any filmmaker working today. He did it in his 2016 smash hit Your Name and to a lesser extent in 2019’s Weathering with You. But Suzume is the most mature, and layered, of these three films.

Suzume moves fast, deals with big emotions, romantic subplots, character heel turns, goofy laughs, and a world-consuming concept. It’s high-concept and mythic, but also stunningly contemporary and relatable. It has such expansive emotions that it’s likely to play well for any mainstream viewer, regardless of their familiarity with recent Japanese history or folklore or general interest in fantasy storytelling. Ultimately, Suzume is proof that in the world of international cinema, there’s no animator currently working (save the oft-retired Hayao Miyazaki) on par with Makoto Shinkai.

9 out of 10

Suzume (2022, Japan)

Written and directed by Makoto Shinkai; starring Nanoka Hara, Hokuto Matsumura, Eri Fukatsu, Shota Sometani, Sairi Ito, Kotone Hanase, Kana Hanazawa, Matsumoto Hakuo II.

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