Another imaginative, emotive, and astonishingly animated fantasia from writer-director Makoto Shinkai (Your Name, Weathering With You), Suzume centers on the title character (Nanoka Hara), a teen who has been raised since a young child by her aunt. On her way to school, Suzume encounters a dashing stranger in her seaside town, follows him to an abandoned resort in the mountains, and discovers a door that serves as a portal to another dimension, through which a giant, malevolent worm emerges unless the stranger, Souta (Hokuto Matsumura), can shut and lock it with a special key. (The red tendrils of that worm, stretching out across the blue sky, are the movie’s animation highlight.) Souta, we learn, is a “Closer,” charged with traveling across Japan in search of such open doors. As Souta and Suzume become a team and visit various sites across the country, Suzume turns into a melancholy reflection on Japan’s history of natural disasters; almost all of the portal sites they visit have been evacuated due to tsunamis, landslides, and the like. At the same time, Suzume has a surprising silliness and sweetness to it (much more so than Shinkai’s previous two features), especially when a magical talking cat (Ann Yamane) transfers Souta’s soul into a rickety, three-legged kid’s chair from Suzume’s childhood. That allows for plenty of sight gags, but also a surprising poignancy, particularly when a flashback to Suzume’s brief time with her mother reveals the formative importance of the chair in her life. Shinkai’s recent films have all been wildly ambitious in terms of their imagination and scope; Suzume might be the most impressive in terms of connecting that to a powerful emotional core.
(5/5/2023)
