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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Peter Bradshaw

Suzume review – Makoto Shinkai’s charming modern Alice in Wonderland

Suzume film still showing the title character in front of a magical door.
A story charting the seismic journey from adolescence to adulthood … Suzume. Photograph: "Suzume" Film Partners

Here is the new animation from the Japanese film-maker Makoto Shinkai, whose 2016 fantasy Your Name captured moviegoers’ imagination and led him to be thought of as a new master and perhaps even the heir to Hayao Miyazaki himself. It is an absorbing, intriguing, bewildering work: often spectacular and beautiful, like a sci-fi supernatural disaster movie or an essay on nature and politics, but shot through with distinctive elements of fey and whimsical comedy.

Suzume (voiced by Nanoka Hara) is a lonely, smart teenager, who lives with her aunt after the death of her mother. While walking one day she chances across a mysterious young man called Souta (Hokuto Matsumura), who is apparently in search of a door. Fascinated and somehow nettled by this stranger and his eccentric quest, Suzume sets out to follow him, stumbling into abandoned ruins and finding a disturbing door in the middle of nowhere.

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