Miyazaki-Lite
Makoto Shinkai rounds out his disaster quasi-trilogy with more of the same in ‘Suzume’: Stellar visuals, okay content.
Suzume
Director: Makoto Shinkai • Writer: Makoto Shinkai
Starring [Japanese]: Nanoka Hara, Hokuto Matsumura, Eri Fukatsu, Ryunosuke Kamiki, Shota Sometani, Sairi Ito, Kotone Hanase, Matsumoto Hakuo, Ann Yamane
Japan • 2hrs 2mins
Opens Hong Kong March 2 • I
Grade: B
Makoto Shinkai is a great visual storyteller. He’s unafraid of doing what’s “stupid” or “silly” with the utmost seriousness – may I turn your attention to the talking, three-legged chair in his latest, Suzume | すずめの戸締まり – and when it comes to fantasy filmmaking that should be commended. And anyway, the chair doesn’t talk for no reason; we’ll get to that. But for all Shinkai’s bravura style he has occasionally fallen short on substance, and no matter how much any of us adore the first two entries in his unofficial Natural Disaster Trilogy, Your Name (where a comet threatened Japan in 2016) and Weathering With You (where a great rain and flooding threatened Japan in 2019), they have similar flaws. Shinkai can rely too heavily on awkward teen comedy and/or tragic family drama (so many orphans in Shinkai films), the ingenue is getting tired (that’s not just a Shinkai thing) and now you can throw a critique of following nearly identical emotional and narrative beats on the heap of questionable creative choices. But it’s unlikely Shinkai fans give a shit about any of that. Suzume was among Japan’s highest grossing films last year (it ranks number 4 as of this writing), right behind Top Gun: Maverick, and the lush art will trump the saccharine story about 17-year-old Suzume Iwato (voiced by a very breathy, sigh-heavy, grunting Nanoka Hara) trying to reconcile the death of her mother and the loss of her home 12 years earlier.
She just had to pick up the stone
Suzume lives in a sleepy Kyushu town with her aunt, Tamaki (Eri Fukatsu), a fortysomething single teacher (she might as well be dead), who’s been Suzume’s guardian since her mother died. On her way to school one day she crosses paths (literally) with the flowing-locked Sota (Hokuto Matsumura), who is looking for a door. Turns out he’s a “closer”, one in a long line in his family, who putts around the country closing magical doors that, if remaining open, unleash earthquakes on Japan, which in their raw form look like giant red Dune worms. So being a dumbass because it’s in the script, Suzume follows him (he’s cute) to his current mission and moves a keystone that initially turns into a cat, the demonic Daijin (Ann Yamane), who then curses Sota and turns him into the aforementioned chair. So far so Shinkai.
Naturally the cat takes off, Sota-the-Chair takes off after her, and Suzume pulls up the rear and winds up on a cross-country trek that ends in Tokyo where they locate the second keystone and close the door on a massive worm. Somewhere along the way the trio picks up Sota’s pal Serizawa (Ryunosuke Kamiki) as well as Tamaki, who in one of Suzume’s funnier moments takes him for a pervert after her niece. If your math is poor I’ll do it for you: 2023 plus 12 years ago comes out to “Tohoku earthquake”, unsurprisingly the moment in time Suzume is having a hard time getting past.
Suzume has plenty going on; volume of story is not Shinkai’s problem. The film is a leisurely journey through nostalgia and memory, and how we deal with the grief of having even that taken away. It’s also a gentle (very gentle) coming-of-age drama with mostly limp sexual tension, a road trip adventure that has Suzume tangled in all kinds picaresque moments with the folks she encounters (Sairi Ito’s nightclub hostess Rumi Ninomiya is among the standouts) and a environmental cautionary tale. All this comes together in an unholy amalgam of sci-fi, Japanese folklore, and horror that will have fans of Shinkai’s brand of youth-focused fairytale apoplectic for two hours. As expected the artwork often makes up for lapses in story logic, with rich backgrounds and minutia worth careful viewing on their own.
Shinkai has been whispered of as the heir apparent to Hayao Miyazaki. Those are some giant shoes to fill, and though Shinkai has an eye for detail and is apparently brimming with sentiment, he hasn’t quite reached Miyazaki heights just yet. That said, Your Name was lightning in a bottle and nearly impossible to top, but Suzume is laced with a constant melancholy that was less omnipresent in the earlier films and some nicely layered characterisation for the supporting players, chiefly Tamaki. This all hints at emerging maturity, so there’s hope for him yet. And if someone told me Shinkai didn’t have a cat I’d straight up call them a liar. Daijin is the work of a person who indeed has a feline overlord. That’s got to be worth something. — DEK