Admirers of the gifted Japanese writer-director Makoto Shinkai will recognize his touch from the opening moments of his often entrancing new animated feature, "Suzume." An affecting story about love and salvation, loss and memory, the movie opens on a dark-blue sky kissed by pastel-sunset pinks and purples, with stars that gleam like perfectly inlaid jewels. You might expect to see a fiery comet streaking past, much like the one that wreaked such beautiful havoc in Shinkai's 2016 smash hit, "Your Name." But the doom that looms here is of a different sort, rooted in somber memories of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake disaster, and realized in the form of a serpentine red monster, known only as the Worm, that portends yet another cataclysm in the making.
The task of holding that monster at bay — of keeping this Worm from literally turning — falls to the unlikely figure of Suzume (voiced by Nanoka Hara in the Japanese-language version), a 17-year-old who's cut from the same sweet-and-spunky cloth as numerous other anime heroines. Suzume unwittingly sets a potential cycle of destruction in motion when she stumbles on what looks like a door to nowhere but turns out to be a portal to a distant dimension known as the Ever-After. A born adventurer, Suzume is intrigued by what lies beyond the doorway, which seems to beckon to her like a half-forgotten dream. But that dream begets a nightmare when the Worm bursts forth through the portal like a furious airborne serpent, one that will cause an enormously destructive earthquake if it makes landfall.
In short order, Suzume joins forces with Souta (Hokuto Matsumura), a handsome young man of mystery armed with a magical key and mighty incantations, which help contain the immediate threat. Together they set out to seal these deadly doors all across Japan, from Suzume's home island of Kyushu to the sprawling metropolis of Tokyo. It's a gravely serious mission, lightened but also complicated by unsurprising comic touches: There's a fast-moving little cat, Daijin (Ann Yamane), an impish White Rabbit to Suzume's Alice. And then there's the unexpected inconvenience of Souta being turned, very much against his will, into a chair.
