Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 10 April

Suzume (Shinkai, 2022)

I’ve written earlier here about how much we love anime auteur Makoto Shinkai. Not just the massive crossover hits Your Name. (2016) and Weathering With You (2019), but we also have a box set of his earlier work including Voices of a Distant Star (2002), The Place Promised in Our Early Days (2004), Children Who Chase Lost Voices (2011) and The Garden of Words (2013).

His latest hit, Suzume, has just landed at Netflix and I dove upon it like a starving man at a buffet.

For the first third of the film you find yourself wondering whether he’s had a bump on the head as this is absolute premium grade “A” whackadoodle – even weirder than usual – involving talking demon cats and handsome teenage boys turned into chairs – but it eventually reveals a profound method to its madness as it wrestles with the collective Japanese trauma from natural disasters, specifically the 2011 Tōhuku earthquake and subsequent tsunami.

Suzume (voiced by Nanoka Hara) is an ordinary orphaned teenage girl, living in a small town with her aunt Tamaki (Eri Fukatsu). One day, on her way to school, she meets a boy (Hokuto Matsumura) who asks directions to a local ruined bathhouse.

Impulsively, she decides to follow but, instead of finding him, she discovers a mysterious door that when opened up, releases powerful underworld chaos that threatens the safety of millions of people.

The boy, Souta, turns out to be a “Closer”, someone tasked with keeping all those portals shut and the people safe, but Suzume has changed the natural balance of things and now doors have to be shut all over Japan.

What results is an exciting, and often very funny, road trip to Tokyo where Suzume starts to learn a lot about the adult world as well as her destiny within it.

Much of Shinkai’s charm is the way he lays the fantastical over the mundane. All his locations are drawn from life – you can do tours of the real Tokyo locations from Your Name. – and the tiny details of clothes, apartments, transport (Oh, my god, the trains!) and food are simply delightful.

Suzume has more humour than we are used to with Shinkai – we laughed out loud on quite a few occasions – and he really leans into the absurdity of the setup but also totally brings it home. The ending really packs a punch.

Despite its presence on streaming services, I really hope this gets a physical media release as I’d love to add it to the collection.

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Where to watch Suzume