Review: Makoto Shinkai's "Suzume" is a beautiful career summation

A deeply felt and stunningly realized slice of big-screen pop entertainment

Whether or not it’s his ‘best’ film, Suzume definitely feels to me like the film Makoto Shinkai has been building towards his entire career. It is a clear culmination to the loose trilogy that started with 2016’s Your Name and continued in 2019’s Weathering With You, both stories about adolescents encountering each other amidst magical realist circumstances surrounding major disasters. Suzume fits this description to, but extends its purview beyond one incident to natural and man-made disasters all over Japan, and the deep layers of history contained therein. But the film also builds on his earlier work, playing with high fantasy imagery and a taciturn male co-lead reminiscent of 2011’s Children Who Chase Lost Voices (Shinkai’s one major creative misfire to date), and featuring a slightly more subdued, less hyper-emotional style than his last two films (RADWIMPS scores the film, again, but there isn’t a vocal song until the end credits, and no big emotional music montages). As a production, Suzume is practically a victory lap for Shinkai and his studio, CoMix Wave Films, an impossibly lush widescreen production featuring set piece after set piece rife with astonishing levels of kineticism; the depiction of movement here, from people to cars to an animate chair, is jaw-dropping. And even by Shinkai’s always-high standards, the character animation, color work, and hyper-detailed backgrounds are a cut above. I saw the film in IMAX, and I think I can say with reasonable confidence there won’t be a more aesthetically overwhelming, intoxicating experience in movie theaters this year.

The obvious critique of Suzume, then – and one I’ve already seen leveled – is that it may be a bit too familiar to Shinkai’s past work, may have too much overlap with themes and character types and images he’s already explored in great detail. I can understand this critique – and if Shinkai’s style hasn’t gelled with you before, Suzume won’t be the film to win you over – but I don’t agree with it. Artists in all mediums tend to circle around ideas across and throughout their work, and what I see in Suzume is a simultaneous expansion and sharpening of what obsesses him: A visually maximalist exploration of what it means to be young in a country and/or world rife with death and disaster, and how or why we choose to live our microscopic lives amidst the macroscopic horrors visited upon humanity, and that humanity visits upon itself. At this moment, Weathering With You is probably still my ‘favorite’ Shinkai film, for the way it so lucidly and powerfully deconstructs the morally bankrupt logic of leaving the responsibilities incurred by global warming to young people who had no hand in destroying the world, but Suzume is in many ways bigger and richer in what it presents to and asks of the viewer. This is a movie I suspect a lot of people are going to fall in love with, young people in particular, and I think it will be a revelatory touchstone to many younger viewers in the same way Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away or Howl’s Moving Castle – both of which feel like major touchstones to Shinkai here – were to people in my generation.

For all the bombast and fantasy and big romantic gestures, Suzume is at its heart a road movie, its characters travelling South to North across the islands of Japan, and making use of every mode of transportation commonly used in the country: Ferry, train, bus, shinkansen, car, bike, and so on. It’s actually two road trips, with the film more or less bifurcated in two between Suzume’s journey with cursed love interest Sōta and her voyage to find and save Sōta alongside her aunt and one of Sōta’s friends. I adore the rhythms of both halves of the movie, the teenage-bonding-cum-disaster-flick shape of the first half giving way to the more intimate, emotionally fraught determination of the second, with diverse locations across Japan constantly giving the film an ever-evolving sense of grounded locality. Set pieces occur in the ruins of both natural disasters and economic downturn, with the high-point of the film’s spectacle coming in a struggle at an abandoned amusement park atop a ferris wheel (a scene that sets a high bar for ufotable to clear in their upcoming film adaptation of Kinoko Nasu’s Witch on the Holy Night, which plays with similar imagery in one of its most memorable sequences). But no matter where the characters are, it feels like they’re somewhere specific, and the theme of empathizing with the dead who haunt these spaces is some of the most affecting work in Shinkai’s filmography (I would also call this a new go-to anime text for introducing people to Shinto ideas in Japanese popular culture – the film does a beautiful job making the world and its component parts feel spectacularly animate).

Suzume herself is a winning protagonist. If I felt for the first half like Shinkai had maybe skipped a step or two in getting us fully invested in her character before leaping into adventure – for all his talents, Shinkai lacks Hayao Miyazaki’s skill for imbuing a character’s physicality with everything you need to know about them, an effect probably best exemplified by Chihiro in Spirited Away – those worries thoroughly melted during the film’s last hour, where the focus is put squarely on Suzume herself and the childhood trauma that marks her. Deploying a personal loss as synecdoche for communal or national suffering is a common trope, but this is the emotional register Shinkai really excels within, and the way Suzume’s fractured memories of the mother she lost at age 4 escalate and connect to the series of disasters she encounters, across both geography and time, is deeply felt and profoundly touching. The film climaxes with its protagonists screaming in defense of their own existence into the void of death and destruction, a moment that recalls the title of Harlan Ellison’s “The Beast that Shouted ‘Love’ at the Heart of the World,’ a title borrowed in another major moment of anime history as the name of the original Neon Genesis Evangelion finale. It is, indeed, a resolution that mirrors ways in which Your Name and Weathering With You resolved their own thematic tensions, but there’s a full-throatedness to this, literally and figuratively, I found startling, a way in which metaphor and fantasy are briefly stripped away to let the characters say what needs saying, directly, to the land and to the world itself.

The film is, of course, a triumph of production on every level. Suzume joins the growing list of anime films presented in full anamorphic widescreen (2.35:1), a format that went unused in anime for decades after its heyday in the 60s, and it is maybe the most effective use of that space I’ve seen since those widescreen Toei epics of 50 years prior. Shinkai has a remarkable eye for how to deploy landscape and motion across that extra width, and the sheer size and scale of the film is constantly enveloping (if you have a chance to see this in IMAX, or any particularly large screen, take it). The voice work is outstanding across the board, as you’d expect in any major anime production, but Suzume herself is particularly effective; Shinkai took the Studio Ghibli tact here of hiring a newcomer with no prior credits, and it pays off big time – Nanoka Hara brings an unvarnished vulnerability to the part that took me aback over and over again.

There’s also a very cute cat with an almost criminally adorable voice, and one of the main characters spends most of the film stuck in the form of an incredibly well-animated three-legged chair; I don’t know where these observations fit in the larger structure of this review, but I would absolutely feel remiss if I failed to mention them. There is also a scene where a character listens and sings along to Yumi Arai’s 1975 classic doo-wop-tinged single “Message in Rouge” (Rūju no Dengon), a track memorably used in Kiki’s Delivery Service, and it’s just the most gosh darn delightful moment I’ve seen in a good long while.

Suzume feels like the end of a phase in Shinkai’s career, like the fully-articulated culmination of something he’s been circling for a long time now. It makes for a wildly rich and rewarding experience in its own right, and makes me more excited than ever to see what Shinkai will do next. It feels like we’re due for another major evolution from him, akin to the one marked by Your Name in 2016, and for an artist who’s exhibited as much growth as he has over the past two decades, that’s a possibility worth relishing. For now, Suzume is a deeply felt and stunningly realized slice of big-screen pop entertainment, and whether or not you’ve followed Shinkai up to now, or even watched much anime in the past, this is an experience that absolutely should not be missed. The space of a movie theater rarely feels this exhilaratingly transformed.