Image © Suzume Film Partners
Suzume
Suzume
Anime won’t elbow Disney out of American multiplexes, yet the Japanese answer to animation has grown a global audience with millions of avid fans. The latest anime feature to fill big screens in the U.S., Suzume, follows its titular adolescent girl-protagonist on an adventure to save Japan from destruction.
Suzume was released by the legendary Toho, the studio behind Godzilla and an unending string of films that encapsulate and personify the national trauma of destruction during World War II. Japan’s cities were consumed by American firebombing in an aerial campaign that climaxed with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It's not too wide a leap to interpret the plumb-colored “Worm” that rises from the Earth and covers the sky, triggering seismic shocks, as an allusion to the towering mushroom clouds of 1945. In Suzume, the Worm is a destructive force from beneath the Japanese islands, held at bay behind closed doors. Suzume stumbles upon a handsome backpacking young man, Sota Munakata. He identifies himself as the Closer, who task it travel across the nation closing doors, preventing disaster. In only the most obvious nod to Japan’s Shinto tradition, he invokes “the divine gods who live beneath this land” as he struggles to keep the doors shut, to forestall new catastrophes. He thinks he’s got it down but turns out he needs some help from plucky Suzume.
Director Makoto Shinkai achieved great success in Japan and elsewhere with his previous films, Your Name and Weathering With You. Suzume follows suit with imaginative storytelling and animation. When the girl picks up the keystone holding back a door that rises from the midst of a shallow pond in an abandoned resort (suggesting the closed districts around the Fukushima nuclear plant), the cold grey stone turns into a warm furry cat and scurries away. Later, in Suzume’s room as Sota Munakata explains his role, the cat materializes on the windowsill, speaks to them and turns the Closer into a three-legged chair. Sota Munakata chases the mischievous cat, his wooden legs pumping furiously, as Suzume follows behind.
Contemporary technology is as embedded in the story as ancient folktales. Cellphones light up as photos of the daring white cat and the anomalous moving chair go viral. The faces of Suzume’s human characters are rendered in simple lines, contrasting with the attention lavished on such natural settings as wind-rustled flowers and tall grass, verdant hillsides, raindrops falling on butterfly wings and the beautiful colors of the strange land Suzume glimpses behind the doors and in her dreams. The color and kineticism of Suzume are rich and vibrant, making most Hollywood animated features, by comparison, look like what they are—processed cheese.
Suzume is screening at Marcus Southgate Cinema, AMC Mayfair, Marcus Bistroplex Southridge, Marcus South Shore Cinema, Movie Tavern Brookfield, Marcus Showtime Cinema, Marcus Ridge Cinema, Marcus North Shore Cinema, Marcus Majestic Cinema, Marcus Menomonee Falls Cinema.
