Don't you just hate it when you follow your crush to a spooky portal and they're transformed into a talking chair by a cat-god hell-bent on unleashing the apocalypse?
Such is life for Suzume (voiced by Nanoka Hara), the high school heroine who lends her name to Makoto Shinkai's new animated feature — a ravishing, romantic, and often very funny road movie that continues the Japanese filmmaker's fruitful obsession with fantastical teen sci-fi.
Though he's been spoken of as the heir to filmmaker and Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki (a claim he's the first to refute), Shinkai, informed by his background in video game animation, has created a universe very much his own, taking familiar coming-of-age feelings of displacement and transforming them into high-concept anime hits. (His 2016 teen body-swap masterpiece, Your Name, is the third-highest-grossing Japanese movie of all time, just one spot behind Spirited Away.)
To be fair, those comparisons probably won't be done any favours by the setting for his latest adventure, the Japanese city of Miyazaki, on the island of Kyushu, where the teenage Suzume, an orphan who lost her mother as a toddler, crosses paths with the dreamy Souta (voiced by Hokuto Matsumura), a young, shaggy-haired drifter in search of local ruins.
Intrigued, and more than a little besotted, Suzume cuts class to follow Souta to the waterlogged remains of a crumbling onsen, where she happens upon a door to another dimension and scoops up a mysterious artefact – unwittingly inviting chaos upon her town and, pretty soon, the entire nation.
Souta, it turns out, is a "closer", one of an ancient order of guardians sworn to protect the earth by sealing the doors to the Ever-After, a realm of forgotten souls that, if left open, will open up an interdimensional can of worms. Literally, in this case: a supernatural, shapeshifting slug streaks across the horizon, capable of causing earthquakes and sundry other mass destruction.
Suzume's removal of the artefact, known as a keystone, has broken that seal, and liberated Daijin (voiced by Ann Yamane), a demigod who manifests, as they do, in the shape of a talking cat. This impish little critter, who looks like a cross between a tarsier and a Meowth, seems harmless, until it puts a curse on Souta and turns him into an anthropomorphic, three-legged wooden chair. Bad kitty.
Needless to say, you haven't experienced cinema until you've witnessed a breakneck chase through the city in which a cat is pursued by an aggrieved, and very flustered, three-legged chair — a wildly kinetic sequence set to an unexpectedly jazzy piece from Shinkai's regular musical collaborators, the eclectic Japanese rock band RADWIMPS.
With Souta trapped in his furniture form, it's up to Suzume to help him hunt down Daijin, who's soon scampering across the country en route to various portals – and accidental social media fame.
"When the worm falls," Daijin crows, between striking cute feline poses for delighted rubberneckers, "the earth will break."
Located in long-forgotten schools, abandoned amusement parks and discontinued subway stations, the portals represent sites of psychic turbulence – what one character calls "lonely places" – where souls drift in the limbo of the Ever-After. (Shinkai says he was inspired by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan "to write a story of mourning deserted places".)
In order to defeat the worm, Suzume and Souta must summon the collective memory of the former denizens of these places, effectively channelling their vibes (to use the technical term) in order to avert disaster.
It's a lovely notion: the act of remembering – of people and forgotten, even haunted, places – as a restorative force, one that speaks to a need to preserve a shared cultural past.
In depicting Suzume's recurrent dreams of her late mother, the film manages – in typical Shinkai fashion – to anchor the imminent apocalypse in the intimate, aligning collective and personal memory in ways that resonate emotionally.
Taken together with Your Name and its meteorological follow-up, Weathering with You (2019), Suzume marks something of an unofficial trilogy for the filmmaker, with a spacey, emotionally intuitive teenager pitted against the forces of some impending cosmic cataclysm; where adolescent emotions are blown up to end-of-the-world proportions and painted with epic, expressionistic strokes.
Working again in traditional hand-drawn animation, albeit with plenty of 3D computer modelling assists, Shinkai delivers spectacular firestorms, ectoplasmic beams and endlessly gorgeous horizons flecked with his beloved lens flares – a world that unfolds in a sort of hazy teenage daydream.
Suzume is a wonderfully imaginative and moving film, and if it doesn't quite achieve the dizzy invention of Your Name – and really, very few recent movies, anime or otherwise, have come close – then it's a rewarding addition to what is fast becoming one of the great bodies of work in contemporary cinema.
Suzume is in cinemas now.
