Director/Screenplay – Makoto Shinkai, Producers – Koichiro Ito & Wakana Okamura, Photography – Ryosuke Tsuda, Music – Kazuma Jinnouchi & Radwimps, Animation Supervisor – Kenichi Tsuchiya, Production Design – Takumi Tanji. Production Company – Story Inc/Comix Wave Films.
Seventeen year-old Suzume Iwato lives in Kyushu, where she has been raised by her aunt Tamaki ever since her mother died when Suzume was young. Suzume is riding to school on her bicycle when she meets a man who asks directions to a set of ruins in the area. Suzume follows the man, finding a strange doorway in the middle of the ruins. The doorway opens to another landscape but she cannot pass through. She picks up a strange stone near the door only for it to turn into a cat and run away. Back at school, she sees billowing clouds emerging into the sky from the ruins, although nobody else can see these. She returns to find the man Souta Munakata struggling to close the door to prevent what he calls a worm from being released. Suzume goes to his aid and the door is closed but Souta is wounded in the process. She takes Souta home to bandage him up. As they are doing so, the cat appears and talks. It causes Souta’s soul to be transplanted inside the three-legged chair that Suzume’s mother left her. Souta explains that the cat Daijin is the stone that Suzume picked up where her doing so opening the doorway and allowed the worm to be freed. Suzume insists on accompanying Souta as he sets out to track Daijin across Japan as it attempts to open the other doorways, all of which are located at the sites of disasters and will unleash untold mass destruction.
Makoto Shinkai is a name that has been gaining growing acclaim in Anime in recent years. Shinkai’s first work was the 25-minute long Voices of a Distant Star (2002) about interstellar email communication, followed by the feature-length The Place Promised in Our Early Days (2004) set in an alternate world Japan and 5 Centimetres Per Second (2007) about a friendship between two people over the years. Shinkai’s name started to be noticed with Children Who Chase Lost Voices from the Deep (2011), followed by the non-genre The Garden of Words (2013), and the wide acclaim enjoyed by Your Name. (2016) and Weathering With You (2019), which have been recipients of multiple awards and nominations.
The Portal fantasy is a popular theme in anime. Suzume does nothing radically different with it – this is not a story about the protagonist venturing through the portal into a fantastical realm as Children Who Chase Lost Voices from the Deep was. In fact, Suzume cannot even pass through the doorway for much of the story; what we have is the portal as a place that can unleash something devastating in potential impact.
Makoto Shinkai creates a great opening that beautifully sets everything out for us. The encounter with the mysterious stranger; the venture up to the ruins that are laid out in beautiful splendour; the opening of the doorway; and then the emergence of the giant billowing cloud stretching up into the sky. This is then propelled into the realm of the quite appealing by the introduction of the WTF elements of a talking cat and an ambulatory three-legged chair. Seeing the odd-legged chair scuttling around, leaping into the midst of action atop runaway Ferris Wheels and the like is one of the more charming things about the film.
In his films, Makoto Shinkai has a love of granular detail. He loves the ordinary simplicity and backgrounds of the sleepy Kyushu town where Suzume lives, of the grandeur of the ruins where the portal lies, of the various street scenes and landscapes as Suzume and Souta journey across the country – you suspect that one of the reasons that the story is the picaresque it is is to allow Shinkai to open up and portray different parts of Japan with the serene beauty he does.
Suzume comes with an epical feel – it has the greatness of the heroine struggling against titanic odds to stop something terrible happening and an eccentrically charming friendship to the centre. There is the picaresque journey, which becomes as much about the backgrounds on display as it is about the colourful characters met throughout and oddly enough an uplifting piece about the unexpected kindness of strangers.
Trailer here