Among artistic media, the capacity for cinema to transport its audience to worlds of wonder, places of rich, boundless imagination, is arguably unrivaled. The unique juxtaposition of audio, transmitted through advanced sound systems, enveloping you in the space, and image, projected onto gargantuan screens, overwhelming and mesmerizing in their scale, can be as fantastical an experience as many of us will experience in our lifetimes. Of course, there’s room for all kinds of cinema, all of which have their merits. But reality is equally well suited to TV. Subtlety is served well by the written word. Fantasy? Nothing, nowhere does that like the cinema.
The movies of Makoto Shinkai are, in every aspect, magnificently cinematic. Their simplest, most mundane qualities are, themselves, quintessentially cinematic – powerful emotions, quirky characters, pristine, stylized animation. This isn’t enough for an artist of Shinkai’s ilk though. His mastery is, specifically, over fantasy, so those quirky characters are typically thrust into scenarios and landscapes of a mystical, supernatural kind, all the better for Shinkai to explore his own boundless imagination through whimsical storytelling and stunning visual design.
And so, Suzume, the schoolgirl protagonist of this movie that shares her name, is swiftly flung down a rabbit hole – well, through a door – into a version of reality she’d only ever dreamt of, several minutes before the title card even appears on screen. She follows a handsome stranger to an abandoned town, where she discovers a portal kept sealed by a keystone. Inquisitive, she picks the keystone up. It becomes animated, wriggles free and flits away, leaving the portal open to the restless, malevolent spirits that had been kept at bay. Now, she’s entangled in a veritable war of the worlds, where she and this handsome stranger must travel across Japan to prevent these spirits from migrating fully into their dimension and wreaking unimaginable carnage.
Oh, and her new friend is now a three-legged chair. The untethered keystone was a spirit in its own right, powerful enough to trap the soul of a young human man in an inanimate object, in this case a miniature seat from Suzume’s younger childhood, itself mysterious and traumatic in ways that will, naturally, become crucial to her quest. It’s quite the David-and-Goliath story, then, a schoolgirl and a three-legged chair alone against forces of world-destroying strength. In true Shinkai style, this is equal inspiration for drama and intensity as it is for charm and comedy and Suzume jostles between moods with a brave velocity, apocalyptically dark one moment, then slapstick and feather-light the next.
This is a movie to show to anyone who thinks fast-paced, plot-packed art must, inevitably, lack either style or nuance. Suzume has both. Shinkai is, foremost, a world-class stylist, his imagery generously suffused with exquisite detail and marvelously bold, bright color. He’s also a rare animation director who’s as confident with action as he is competent in it – Suzume’s action sequences are superbly designed and excellently paced, with striking compositions, masterful use of speed and motion and a vital sensitivity to scale. Whether plummeting to the ground from hundreds of feet in the air or leaping from car to car on a spinning ferris wheel, Shinkai knows the emotive power of scale and movement in filmmaking and uses his expertise as an animator to push this power to its maximum.
And then there’s the nuance. The mystique in mystical things lies, aptly, in their mystery; explain every element in its every detail and, suddenly, the mystery is lost. Shinkai leaves a few central elements in Suzume unexplained, even as you expect some cathartic resolution to their narrative significance. Of course, there’s plenty of melodrama as the movie enters its full-throttle third act, weaving together most of the loose threads with such passionate earnestness that it’s likely to wring a tear or two from even the coolest of viewers. But some threads are left loose, their full backstory knowable only to those viewers who wish to construct one for themselves. It’s a poignant touch, genuinely affecting in a movie that, otherwise, guides its audience through every micro-movement in every step.
But that’s no concern either. The majesty of Shinkai’s fantasies coupled with the sheer beauty of their realization is so vast and impressive that he can afford to belabor every last detail – you’re still bound to miss at least a few. There’s simply so much going on in Suzume – from the vivid animation to the several unpredictable swerves taken en route along its narrative path – that it’s irresistibly captivating. It sticks its hooks in early and doesn’t let them out until two hours later. The smart, sensitive viewer may find themselves eager only to get hooked all over again.
Photo courtesy of Crunchyroll
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