The secret behind the finest Japanese animation films is their ability to set the viewer’s imagination on fire as she or he confronts the most profound philosophical and metaphysical questions that include death and afterlife, identity and gender, fate and will. Leading animator Makoto Shinkai belongs to a creative élite able to translate these complex themes into YA fantasy adventure, at the same time addressing collective fears of natural disasters, of which Japan has more than its fair share, and meaningful emotional questions about love and loss that particularly relate to young people.
Suzume, his fetchingly brilliant new work, recaps many of the themes, images and plot threads that obsessed the director in his 2016 smash hit Your Name, in which a teenage boy and girl swap bodies, and his 2019 Weathering with You, which debates the morality of one life being sacrificed to save millions. A runaway hit in Japan, where it was released last November to the tune of $100 million in box office grosses, Suzume is making its international bow in Berlin’s main competition, which hasn’t happened to a Japanese film since Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away in 2002. It will spread its charms worldwide this spring.
Not just fantasy, the film is firmly grounded in real events – specifically the great earthquake and tsunami that destroyed tens of thousands of lives in the area of Sendai, Japan in 2011. In Shinkai’s screenplay, the ruins of a town are overgrown with grass and weeds; perched on a rooftop towers the rotting hull of a big boat. Among the lives the disaster claimed is Suzume’s mother, when the girl was just four. Although her child’s understanding of events was limited, she expressed her anxiety drawing pages of thick black lines in her diary. Instead of discovering all this backstory in conventional flashbacks, it is neatly integrated as the buried and later unearthed memories of teenage Suzume, who is around 17 when the main story takes place.
Now she is in high school and living with her young aunt in a seaside village of great natural beauty. Biking to school she meets a handsome young stranger on the road, and for Suzume it’s love – or at least a serious crush – at first sight. Souta is looking for ruins, and she first directs him to an area of overgrown derelict buildings, then impulsively follows him. It is she who finds a lonely door in the middle of a shallow pool – and opens it.
Like other doorways in Shinkai’s work through which his protags pass, it opens onto another world, a parallel universe whose starry, fire-streaked cosmos would put many VR games to shame. But what Suzume sees on the other side is out of reach: it is the Ever-After and forbidden to the living. When she pulls a deeply buried cat statue out of the pool, it turns into a white kitten named Daijin and scampers away.
Inadvertently, Suzume has uprooted the guardian of the door, a sort of earth god protecting the world from earthquakes. Now all hell breaks loose and Suzume and Souta watch in horror and dismay as a giant ruby-colored plume snakes out of the door and rises high in the sky, multiplying itself and causing tremors in the town when it falls to the ground. Only the two of them can see it.
Much to Suzume’s surprise (there’s a lot to shock her, and Shinkai uses her amazement to amplify the audience’s), Souta belongs to a family of “Closers” who close open doors to the underworld and lock them with a special key. It’s not easy, considering the ruby-red worm has the force of a wildfire, but he gets the first door closed. Evading her over-protective aunt, Suzume takes him home to medicate his bleeding arm, and this is where a bit of whimsical body horror turns the story in a new direction. Daijin the ex-guardian cat reappears and transforms the attractive Souta into a wooden chair, the kind children sit on. Even in this humorously reduced format, he can run on his three legs (one is missing) and make Superman leaps through the air. But now he needs Suzume’s hands to turn the key in the lock.
Morphing into an animated road movie as Daijin mischievously leads them to the doors that are opening next, they race up and down Japan trying to avert ever greater disasters. The girl unafraid of death and the little three-legged chair meet all sorts of helpful people along the way and have some pretty mad adventures, all of which lighten up the mood of the earthquake busters. Because the line, ‘You never know, Tokyo might go tomorrow’ is from Your Name, but it could easily serve as a warning here.
Shinkai and his animators achieve a good balance between the nonsense and mortal danger in fabulous action scenes like the one set on a rusty ferris wheel in an abandoned amusement park, a scene topped by a spectacular cosmic blow-out in which the girl who doesn’t fear death, the chair and two cat-gods ride the biggest worm of all as it circles and expands over Tokyo. But rightly, the last word is reserved for Suzume as she faces herself across time. It’s a wrenching scene that pushes emotional buttons, yes, but also brings closure to this complex and beautiful tale.
Shinkai, who has often been called the heir of Hayao Miyazaki, salutes his great predecessor when Suzume and her friends are barreling down the highway in a red convertible listening to classic J-pop on the radio, a tip of the hat to Kiki’s Delivery Service. But by now it is clear he has a style all his own; a more open-minded approach to his teenage characters who have modern minds, as a very individualistic and realistic voice cast led by Nanoka Hara in the title role and Hokuto Matsumura as Souta make clear.
Director, screenplay: Makoto Shinkai
Cast: Nanoka Hara, Hokuto Matsumura, Eri Fukatsu, Shota Sometani, Sairi Ito, Kotone Hanase, Kana Hanzawa, Ryunosuke Kamiki, Hakuo Matsumoto, An Yamane
Character design: Masayoshi Tanaka
Animation director: Kenichi Tsuchiya
Art director: Takumi Tanji
Production companies: STORY Inc., CoMix Wave Films
World sales: Crunchyroll
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (International competition)
In Japanese
127 minutes
