Suzume Review: Shinkai Makoto’s Shimmering Tale About Making Peace with the Past

With Suzume, Shinkai Makoto reaffirms his auteurist bona fides.

Suzume
Photo: CrunchyRoll

With Suzume, Shinkai Makoto reaffirms his auteurist bona fides. He continues to employ the same visual motifs and return to the same essential themes and story structures to create a filmmaking style that’s unmistakably his own. Suzume doesn’t see Shinkai bringing these pieces together quite as powerfully as he did with 2016’s Your Name, but his command of his chosen art form is as sharp as it is effortlessly enchanting.

Suzume begins in typical Shinkai fashion, dropping us in a quiet Japanese mountain town where a young person is about to strike out on a life-changing adventure. Here, that young person is Suzume (Hara Nanoka), who’s living with her aunt after losing her mother years ago. The girl is on her way to school one day when she’s stopped in her tracks by the appearance of a boy, Souta (Matsumara Hokuto), who says he’s looking for a door. In this moment, Suzume is struck both by the long-haired stranger’s beauty and the uncanny sense that they’re somehow connected.

Without knowing quite why, Suzume follows Souta to an abandoned resort where she discovers a door that provides a glimpse to the world beyond ours: a land of gods and souls known as The Ever-After. It’s a place where past, present, and future collide, transforming the air above into a swirl of starlight and sunshine, and it’s rendered in breathtaking fashion. Shinkai’s films are filled with vibrant blues, hazy moonlit evenings, and the glitter of sunlight refracted delicately through drops of rain. As well as its immense aesthetic beauty, this imagery is fundamental to the wistful, yearning atmosphere of his romantic fantasies. By creating a place like The Ever-After, Suzume allows him to unleash this signature superpower of his to its full potential.

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But Suzume doesn’t get much time to stand around and admire the sky above. It turns out that an evil force known as the Worm, which is composed of swirling red tendrils, lives in this dominion, in search of a chance to break through any number of doors here and wreak havoc in our world. It’s Souta’s job to go around finding those doors and seal them shut before the Worm can get out. But when something goes wrong, the pair are forced to embark on a cross-country journey to keep the monster at bay. And, also, Souta gets turned into a chair.

“The film about the girl whose boyfriend is a chair” has pretty much become Suzume’s unofficial tagline, and it’s a creative choice that leads the story in some delightfully zany directions. It’s almost as if Shinkai and his collaborators challenged themselves by asking, “How much can we get the audience to connect with a faceless, three-legged wooden stool?” And the answer, it turns out, is a whole lot, thanks to how charmingly Souta’s chair form has been animated. His clunky wooden movements are profoundly expressive, with the animators eking perfect bits of physical comedy and sincere pathos out of the character’s limited range of motion. The sound design also plays a big part in this animated flourish’s effect, as a wooden knock accompanies each step that he takes, which is especially satisfying when he’s galloping along at full speed.

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For much of its runtime, Suzume is structured as a road trip, with our protagonists making their way from one door to another, forming new friendships on each leg of their journey. From Souta’s benignly dirtbag-ish classmate Serizawa (Kamiki Ryûnosuke) to the bluntly maternal bar owner Rumi (Ito Sairi), each of these new characters brings a fresh burst of life to the film.

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But as enjoyable as the journey is, Suzume doesn’t arrive at is destination quite as effectively as Shinkai’s finest works do. The core of the film is really about Suzume finding a way to step out of her past, closing the door on those painful memories and moving forward. It’s a theme that the Ever-After and its Monsters, Inc.-esque magic doors have been clearly crafted for, but it finds itself a little crowded out by all the other passengers the narrative picks up along the way.

Suzume has a conflict with her aunt that is introduced and resolved in the space of five minutes. Souta has some hazily defined existential woe to work through. There’s a full-on god battle going on in the finale and, of course, Souta and Suzume have to realize that they’re in love.

That last element feels particularly underdeveloped. Of course, high schoolers falling apocalyptically in love after just a few days is a staple of Shinkai’s filmography and a whole tradition of anime storytelling. But because the will-they-or-wont-they of Souta and Suzume gets crushed in between all the other narrative elements—with Souta actually disappearing from the film altogether for a good chunk of it—their dramatic declarations of love don’t really land.

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Shinkai is still incredible at constructing a rousing crescendo for his films at a textural level—the combination of his iridescent visual style and RADWIMPS’s sentimental pop-rock is a potent one-two punch—but the finale here is just a bit too muddled. The big set piece that ends the film is spectacular, but the life-affirming speech that accompanies it is fairly generic, and not especially anchored to Suzume’s or Souta’s personal journey. But while it might not stick the landing, Suzume is consistently delightful, offering up an unrelenting supply of shimmering, sun-dappled visuals and a sweet, strange story about a young girl making peace with her past.

Score: 
 Cast: Hara Nanoka, Matsumara Hokuto, Kamiki Ryûnosuke, Ito Sairi, Fukatsu Eri  Director: Shinkai Makoto  Screenwriter: Shinkai Makoto  Distributor: CrunchyRoll  Running Time: 122 min  Rating: G  Year: 2022  Buy: Video

Ross McIndoe

Ross McIndoe is a Glasgow-based freelancer who writes about movies and TV for The Quietus, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Wisecrack, and others.

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