Suzume review – Makoto Shinkai’s charming modern Alice in Wonderland
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.
Like a modern Alice, she opens it – and appears to unleash vast cosmic forces and earthquakes. It appears that Souta’s mission was to seal up these calamitous portals; he says that his vocation is that of a “closer”, for which he needs a “keystone”. But a bizarre quirk of fate transforms Souta into a broken-down child’s chair that hobbles about talking in Souta’s voice, and as for the keystone, it takes the form of a talking cat called Daijin (Ann Yamane).
And so their adventures commence, at once vastly mythic and quirkily comic, and the resulting flavour has some undoubted charm. Suzume can be read at one level as about the seismic changes of adolescence and adulthood, but isn’t only (or maybe at all) about sex: it’s about status, respect and being seen. Suzume has something important to do, and of course what she has to do is protect nature itself, an idea with its own generational importance.
Suzume screened at the Berlin film festival, and is released on 13 April in Australia, and on 14 April in the US and UK.