Perhaps the most influential anime auteur of the last decade, Makoto Shinkai has a knack for making immense emotional stakes feel small. In his latest film, Suzume, a teen girl races against time to save Japan from cataclysmic disaster, yet the more compelling maelstrom is the one rumbling inside of her.
Feelings of desperation and distance are central to the Shinkai canon. His adolescent protagonists are often consumed by their intense feelings. In 5 Centimeters per Second, his most grounded work to date, a young man can't seem to move on from his childhood love; The Garden of Words is a tale of two people seeking human connection; and in Your Name — the global blockbuster that put the visionary on the mainstream map — two teens separated by time fall in love.
Suzume, however, subverts some of the writer-director's most-overused tropes. Rather than the connection between two people, the film explores the one you have with yourself, a far messier state of vulnerability.
As Suzume learns to put herself first, to heal herself, a more captivating version of this film emerges.
What is Suzume about?
Suzume (Nanoka Hara) is a 17-year-old girl living on the southwestern island of Kyushu. Having lost her mother at a young age, she's been raised by her aunt Tanaki (Eri Fukatsu). It's clear Tanaki put her own life on pause to take care of Suzume, and she's a bit overprotective as a result. (This tension between Suzume and Tanaki slowly simmers throughout the film.)
One day, Suzume passes a handsome stranger on her way to school. He asks if there are any ruins nearby, and she points him in the direction of an abandoned onsen. She decides to go after him and stumbles across what he was looking for: a mysterious door. When she opens it, she sees a starlit vista, but she can't seem to step inside the mystical landscape. After several attempts, she accidentally bumps into a stone and pulls it from the ground (a rookie mistake), unleashing a mischievous feline deity named Daijin.
This sets off a chain of events that happen at a breakneck pace: Suzume, completely freaked out, flees the scene and goes to school, only to return when she sees a giant red worm monster arise from the ruins; she helps the mysterious Hot Boy close the door and lock the creature on the other side; she takes Hot Boy, who introduces himself as Souta (Hokuto Matsumura), back to her house to clean his wounds, and he tells her that she unknowingly released an ancient keystone that prevents the worm from causing massive earthquakes; and then Daijin turns Souta into a chair. Yes, a chair.
Mind you, all of this happens within the first 15 minutes of the movie. The pretty male lead you think is going to be a romantic love interest for Suzume turns into a chair. It's a truly zany plot device, but Shinkai commits to the bit, even staging an elaborately entertaining chase sequence in which Souta, in chair form, chases after Daijin on his three wooden legs, all while Suzume runs after them on foot.
And this is only the beginning of Suzume's adventure, which takes her and Souta on a road trip along Japan's coastline to close more doors and make Daijin return to his post before the worm monster triggers even bigger tremors and destroys the country.
Suzume reckons with tragedy, but it doesn't wallow in it.
Along her journey, Suzume learns that the ineffable place beyond the doors is called the Ever-After. It's a version of the afterlife, and the reason she can see it is because she once entered the realm before: as a small child, Suzume lived through a devastating earthquake and tsunami that decimated her seaside town, killing her mother and leaving her abandoned. It's unclear why Suzume could cross over into the Ever-After, but it's implied that her brush with death brought her to this place.
The ecological disaster that destroyed Suzume's town is a direct reference to the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that ravaged the northeastern coast of Japan and killed roughly 20,000 people. This isn't the first of Shinkai's films to reckon with the national tragedy and Japan's history of ecological upheaval. In fact, this is the third in a disaster trilogy. The meteor that leveled Itomori in Your Name was inspired by the 2011 earthquake, while Weathering With You took on climate change.
With Suzume, Shinkai mythologizes a real-life disaster, allowing Suzume to heal by confronting her trauma head-on. In interviews, Shinkai has said that his inspiration came from the idea that as a human race we live side by side with disaster — that life as we know it, at any given moment, could crumble and fall apart. That's true for disasters both big and small, external and interior. This is what makes such a uniquely Japanese story feel so universal.
Suzume is Makoto Shinkai's funniest film to date.
One of the main characters is a talking chair, so yes, Suzume has jokes. That was intentional on Shinkai's part, who wanted to balance the film's inherent heaviness with moments of levity. And as funny as the "chair boyfriend" conceit is, the real comedic relief of the film comes from Souta's smooth-talking best friend Serizawa (Ryunosuke Kamiki, who fans may recognize as the Japanese voice of Taki in Your Name). Serizawa is kind of an idiot, but he's an endearing idiot, and his chemistry with Tanaki — who eventually tracks Suzume down in Tokyo — is a reprieve from the angst of the film's third act.
Another highlight is the trickster kitty Daijin. He's just so cute and misunderstood. He just wants to experience love! He wants to be Suzume's lapcat, not a mythical guardian stone! He wants to live! (Just thinking about this cat makes me cry.)
A small side plot involves Daijin becoming a bit of an internet celebrity as he leads Suzume and Souta from door to door. At one point, Hayao Miyazaki's Whisper Of the Heart is referenced — a nod to the legendary animator whose work inspired Shinkai's own affinity for magical realism. You'll even spot a little bit of Jiji in Daijin.
Makoto Shinkai's visual style is as stunning as ever.
No one draws a sky quite like Makoto Shinkai. He illustrates the stillness and simplicity of everyday life through dreamy landscapes of sunset skies that bleed vibrant hues — pinks, oranges, and blues that swirl on canvas and scatter sunrays, casting rich purple shadows below. Beams of light illuminate the beauty that Shinkai sees in the world.
If you're looking for an evolution of Shinkai's visual style, you won't find it here. It's exactly what you've come to expect from him. The character design is simple, the scenery is lushly animated, the meanings are metaphorical, and the color and tone of the light is still the focus. Shinkai is a master at mood lighting.
In Suzume, the Ever-After exists beyond space and time. It's the place where the past, present, and future meet in an eternal blue hour. Twilight is the liminal space where Suzume — and all of Shinkai's teen protagonists — find themselves. No longer children, not quite adults, twilight represents the in-between. It's the state of coming of age.
Suzume isn't Shinkai's typical teen romance.
Suzume isn't another fantastical teen romance from Makoto Shinkai. Suzume's love for Souta isn't romantic; he's the manic pixie dream boy of her story. She's the hero, the heart and soul of the film, and truthfully, a better version of this movie would have dedicated even more time to her growth.
In its final minutes, Suzume finally finds catharsis. This is the emotional high of the film. It's poignant, devastating, and ultimately, uplifting. It's all of the things we've come to expect from Shinkai's work.
Shinkai is sometimes criticized for making the same movie over and over again, for using the same themes and recycling visual motifs. To that end, Suzume demonstrates his usual aesthetic quirks. (It also features an enchanting soundtrack from the Japanese band RADWIMPS, his frequent collaborators.) But its emotional core feels deeper. It's grounded in something real, the grief that still lingers for an entire population — so much so that Shinkai has now spent three films unpacking it for a younger generation.
Suzume is his most personal entry in this trilogy. It feels like an exhale. Maybe now he can close that door once and for all.
Suzume is now playing in U.S. theaters.
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