Sometimes referred to as Japan’s new Miyazaki, animator/director extraordinaire Makoto Shinkai is back with Suzame, the follow-up to 2019’s Weathering With You. Shinkai is best known for the global megahit Your Name, which is second only to the aforementioned Studio Ghibli co-founder for highest-grossing domestic films in Japan (Spirited Away still has the top spot). The Miyazaki comparisons stem mostly from this impressive feat – introducing the first alternative to the Totoro powerhouse that can compete on the same financial and cultural level.
Shinkai is certainly tough to beat: we’re talking about a guy who spent seven solid months making a cinema-quality OVA (Original Video Animation) almost entirely by himself on his home computer in the late 90s. His films effortlessly blend photorealism – using real locations as a basis – and stunning digital artistry that make even the banalest urban areas appear magical. The problem with being a Shinkai fan these days, however, is it feels like he’s gotten stuck in a creative rut. Suzame, while highly enjoyable, exemplifies this.
Beginning in Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost island, the film follows high-schooler Suzame Iwato (Nanoka Hara), who happens, on her way to school, across a mysterious stranger – Souta (Hakoto Matsumura). Souta’s heading to an even stranger location: a derelict onsen (hot springs) resort, where there remains a doorway to another dimension free from the constraints of time and space. His job is to keep the terrors from the other side spilling out into our world, but when a curious Suzame innocently interferes, the pair are forced to embark on a road trip around the country to fix the mess before disaster strikes.
This disaster comes in the form of earthquakes, which Japan is unfortunately prone to. There have been a handful of particularly devastating ones in modern times, the most recent being the quake and tsunami of 2011 in Tōhoku. The film makes clear reference to these as pitstops on Suzame and Souta’s journey, as well as taking inspiration from mythological beings once thought to be their cause. Here, Shinkai reverently honours the memories of lives lost and forgotten by making abandoned sites of disaster places where the veil between life and death can be pierced and memories haunt them like ghosts. This makes Suzame and Souta’s method of closing doorways also a ritual of psychological closure, putting spirits to rest and cleansing the ground scarred by death so it can one day be used again.
Natural disaster has been at the forefront of Shinkai’s filmmaking for a while, from a comet falling to earth in Your Name to non-stop rainfall in Weathering With You. These always form seemingly impassable obstacles between his characters’ blooming romances, where the cost of protecting love is an ethical burden as well as physical and emotional. Without giving too much away, there are even more body-transformation hijinks ala Your Name. This is why Suzame, for me, felt a bit too formulaic. Many filmmakers return to the same ideas, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with doing that if they have more to say (Mamoru Hosoda loves the Internet; Darren Aronofsky is obsessed with the Bible, and so on), but Shinkai seems disinterested in reconstituting his singular passion into different kinds of stories to keep things fresh.
While I’d still recommend it to newcomers, what we’re left with in Suzame is another Shinkai film that is as technically splendid as usual – from animation to soundtrack to voice acting – but for returning fans, a tick-box-checking affair of all his standard hallmarks.
Dir. Makoto Shinkai (12A, 122 mins)
Suzame is in cinemas now
words HANNAH COLLINS