SUZUME - Mark Reviews Movies

Suzume, Crunchyroll

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 13, 2023

It's very easy to become caught up in the imagination and general weirdness of writer/director Makoto Shinkai's Suzume. That's one of the filmmakers' obvious strengths, as his previous work has made clear and this new movie continues to show.

This one revolves around the tale of a cross-country trip to stop a series of disasters from befalling increasingly populated places. The disasters, by the way, are being caused by a mischievous cat, opening mystical doors to a sort of afterlife and unleashing giant worms made of a substance that looks like burning red smoke.

None of it really makes much sense, which is both refreshing and frustrating. It's the former because that allows Shinkai and his team of artists to concentrate on coming up with unique ideas and bringing them to life by way of some beautiful animation. It's frustrating, though, because the filmmaker wants us to become involved in this tale on a level deeper than its strangeness and its visual flair. That, though, becomes too difficult when the sights are so strong and the storytelling is so thin.

Part the thinness feels intentional—at least near the beginning, when Shinkai's screenplay more or less employs a pretty clichéd setup. It's almost as if he knows the real point here doesn't have much to do with the characters, the plot, or the themes, because all of those might as well come from standard-issue template.

We meet Suzume (voice of Nanoka Hara), a teenage girl living in a city in the southern-most part of Japan's largest islands—a detail that's only important because of how much traveling she does over the course of a few days. At night, she has a dream of herself as a small child, wandering the ruins of a town, with buildings collapsed and boats littered around and even atop the remnants, and calling out for her mother. As we soon learn, the girl, living with her aunt Tamaki (voice of Eri Fukatsu), is an orphan, which is enough character establishment and development for the adventure that follows, apparently.

Putting that aside until a third act when Suzume's mostly ignored grief and longing become vital to the story, she encounters a mysterious young man on her way to school. The guy is named Souta (voice of Hokuto Matsumura), and his enigmatic nature is all that we get and, apparently, need from him before he disappears from the tale. Well, his human form exits the movie, to be replaced by the walking and talking three-legged chair, built by Suzume's late mother, that his soul inhabits.

It's difficult to determine which is more daring: that Shinkai came up with and implements such a ridiculous idea, which is fine and amusing enough, or that the filmmaker decided that much of the emotional foundation for this tale would revolve around the protagonist's relationship with a possessed inanimate object. This is emblematic of the whole dichotomy of the movie, because the second part of that frustrates, while the first part is almost inventive enough for us not to care about the narrative issues it creates.

Still, few of those developing problems matter as the plot initially unfolds. Souta has come to this city on a countrywide tour of abandoned or ruined places, such as an old resort in Suzume's town. The girl tells him about the place as they cross paths on the road, and intrigued by the stranger, Suzume decides to look for him there.

Instead, she brings a cat statue to life, opens an isolated door that leads to another dimension, and accidentally unleashes that smoky worm. She and Souta manage to shut the door and lock it, although the worm falls to ground and causes an earthquake. Souta reveals his job is to make sure doors like this across Japan remain locked, lest the forces from that other realm cause horrific disasters. Soon after, the cat transforms Souta into the little chair, meaning Suzume has to help him stop the talking cat Daijin (voice of An Yamane) before it can open more doors.

There's a lot to admire about the movie—especially the art style that, in incorporating a mix of traditional and computer animation, allows for so much realism in its backdrops and creativity in the design of its otherworldly elements—and even its shallow story—particularly in the mood of isolation and loneliness it focuses upon with its characters and their search for empty spaces, which were once so filled with life. The overall tone juggles humor, with the physical comedy of the possessed chair and the adorably devious cat, and doom, as disasters of the past signal what could come with the pair's failure, with some skill, too.

The downside to all of this is that the constant rushing from place to place, along with the underlying issues of characters who mainly exist for the purposes of this plot, keeps any emotional connection to this tale at bay. We don't need to understand the intricacies of the self-contained mythology of Suzume, but we do need some human or thematic focal point for that mythology to feel like more than just a gimmick. Shinkai's movie is brimming with creativity, but when it comes time for these ideas and sights and pieces of back story to really mean something, the movie's emotional shortcuts arrive at a dead end.

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