Add Category
SUZUME ★★★
(PG) 122 minutes
It may be slipping into Australian cinemas quietly, but globally speaking the latest animated fantasy from writer-director Makoto Shinkai (Your Name) is a genuine blockbuster, having wiped the floor with the Hollywood competition in China, Korea and elsewhere. Fans of Suzume have even started making pilgrimages to the real-life locations that inspired the settings, such as the volcanic island of Kyushu, where the teenage heroine of the title, voiced by Nanoka Hara, lives with her aunt (Eri Fukatsu).
The plot of Suzme transports us through a series of landscapes, rural and urban, from tranquil southern Japan to Tokyo and beyond.
One day on her way to school, Suzume crosses paths with a shaggy-haired stranger a few years older who asks for directions. Drawn to him at first sight, she trails him to a ruined hot springs resort where she’s faced with a mysterious freestanding door surrounded by water.
The door, it develops, is one of numerous portals scattered across Japan that lead to the Ever After, an afterlife realm where all time happens at once.
Living humans can’t cross over, but from the other side the doors are entry points for a malignant force known as the “worm” – a tornado of scarlet fire snaking across the sky, overtly paralleling various natural disasters which have struck Japan in recent times.
The handsome stranger (Hokuto Matsumura) turns out to be a Closer, a hereditary position that involves racing across the country shutting the doors and saving the world from destruction.
Unfortunately, he’s been transformed into a small, wonky chair with a missing leg, left over from Suzume’s childhood (“Can I step on you?” she asks charmingly, when she already has).
Psychoanalysts would probably have something to say about this, but it’s a case of “choose your own interpretation” – which is true, too, of the thrusting worm, and indeed the adorable white kitten with magic powers which may or may not be a force for evil in its own right.