Suzume Review

Makoto Shinkai finally says the thing his last two films circled. Suzume Iwato lives with her aunt in Kyushu, meets a young man named Souta who travels Japan closing doors in abandoned places so that a vast worm cannot pour through them as an earthquake, and pulls a stone from the ground that becomes a small white cat, which promptly turns Souta into the child's chair her late mother made her. The road trip that follows, through Ehime, Kobe and Tokyo and finally to the coast of Tohoku, ends at the home she lost in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, and the film treats that with a care that earns its tears.

The animation is the film's great strength: ruined theme parks and schools rendered in Shinkai's crystalline light, the worm staged as a red column rising over Tokyo, and a chair that runs, jumps and fights with a comic physicality the director had never tried. The objections are to the structure. There is a lot of plot, the cat's motives stay fuzzy, and Souta spends most of the running time as furniture, which leaves the romance an idea rather than a relationship. It competed for the Golden Bear at Berlin in 2023, the first Japanese animated film in that competition since Spirited Away.