abstract review

It’s the classic fairy tale: boy meets girl, boy becomes chair, boy and girl stop natural disasters. After the successful environmental disaster melodramas of Your name AND grow old with youMakoto Shinkai’s latest revision returns to familiar destructive terrain, but while those films offered comfort from a fantastic distance, summary (despite his walking and talking chair) is much more realistic. This is a guide to commemoration, mourning, and a historical record of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.

After losing her parents in the disaster and since moving across the country, Suzume (voiced by Nanoka Hara) meets environmental vigilante Sōta (Hokuto Matsumura), an agile, long-haired emo dreamer who roams Japan, stopping bulbous and electrified worms. ‘. who invade the heavens and meet an earth-shaking power. However, when Souta transforms into Suzume’s beloved children’s three-legged chair, she becomes a passenger on a journey through repressed memories, national traumas and community ties.

So the couple embarked on a journey, meeting many people, each with their own connection to the earthquake, gradually returning to the hometown of Suzume, to confront their memories and consider the pain of a nation, whatever showed in a dwelling kaiju. Hellscape, which while spectacular, takes the film away from its strongest meditative episodes.

More cartoonish than his previous hyper-realistic urban animations, Shinkai’s style here is looser and more expressively drawn, allowing a chair to move with burlesque flails (inspired by the movements of Luxo Jr, the Pixar lamp), but also register vividly intense emotions through rough, dark lines. Japanese rock band Radwimps are also walking a tightrope, who instilled teenage angst into every guitar cut of the _Your Name’_ soundtrack, but whose eclectic ensemble here, in collaboration with composer Kazuma Jinnouchi, goes from big band jazz to ethereal. frenetic chorals and ballads in a soft and joyful style.

While potentially cheesy, Suzume is an incredibly funny epitaph, her unlikely three-legged hero always on hand to provide comic relief at the perfect moment. Funny, fast-paced, and emotionally attuned, even after the chair has spent a lot of time off-screen, it’s still a sit-down movie.