122 min | PG | April 14, 2023 | Crunchyroll
A teenage girl in rural Japan opens a strange door and lets loose the force that causes earthquakes. She chases it across the country with a talking three-legged chair for a companion. Makoto Shinkai turns a nation’s grief into a road movie.
Suzume Iwato is a seventeen-year-old who lives with her aunt in a quiet town in Kyushu. She meets Souta Munakata, a young man traveling the country in search of abandoned doors. She follows him into a ruin and opens one. The door releases a red force that swells out of the sky and triggers earthquakes when it falls back to earth. A spirit in the shape of a cat turns Souta into a three-legged child’s chair, and the two set out to seal every open door across Japan. The fantasy is a vehicle for the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and the grief that disaster leaves in the places it empties.
Nanoka Hara voices Suzume with a directness that keeps the character from collapsing into a standard anime heroine. She plays the early scenes as a girl chasing a crush and the later ones as someone walking toward her own loss. Hokuto Matsumura voices Souta and does most of his work after the character becomes a chair, which forces the entire performance into the voice. He sells the wounded pride of a young man reduced to furniture. Eri Fukatsu gives the aunt Tamaki a worn patience that cracks open in one devastating roadside argument. Kana Hanazawa voices Suzume’s mother Tsubame in a small role that anchors the film’s final movement.
Makoto Shinkai writes and directs, and his command of light remains the most striking thing on screen. He renders the earthquake force as a churning red rope of smoke that pours into the sky above carefully observed Japanese skylines. The road-movie structure carries the film from a ferry to a roadside snack bar to a Tokyo high-rise without losing momentum. The score swells under the door-sealing rituals and pulls the spectacle toward something closer to prayer. Shinkai keeps cutting back to ruined towns, idle ferris wheels, and shuttered schools, and the camera treats each emptied place as a thing worth mourning.
Suzume works because Shinkai grounds the disaster fantasy in a specific national wound and refuses to look away from it. The tone wobbles when the comic chair business runs alongside the elegy for the dead. The film recovers every time it returns to its real subject, which is a child who survived something she cannot yet name. Shinkai builds the entire road across Japan so that Suzume can reach the one door she has spent the movie avoiding. The closing stretch earns its emotion because the journey was always pointed at it.