Criticism of ‘Suzume’, the fantastic adventure in the tone of feel good medley

The film that concludes the disaster trilogy, with ‘Your Name’ and ‘Time With You’, is written within the orthodox parameters of the fantastic adventure in a potpourri tone feel good: Suzume is a “normal girl”, of high school age, who must assume the role of Sealer of Doors after accidentally releasing a chaotic-evil cat, who in turn will transform her boyfriend, former Sealer, into a small chair . Makoto Shinkai’s new anime play at home, develops in an adventurous register that does not abandon the linguistic stitches of the anime (neither aesthetically nor expressively)although, as usual in his filmography, instead of perfecting them, he remixes and hyperbolizes them without adding anything especially new or too interesting in return. The antagonistic cat is the son of Kyubei, from ‘Puella Madoka Magica’, and the final confrontation above the skies of Tokyo smells too much of ‘The Boy and the Beast’ by Mamoru Hosoda.

Nor does he refine the gestures of his writing, as usual ultimately orbiting around a tender family conflict and, in terms of script, always better planned than executed (Since ‘The place we promised ourselves’, Shinkai stumbles when it comes to closing his universes disintegrated between places, times and genres in plausible bottlenecks). As usual, for his third act he chooses the family melodrama, which guarantees the emotion of the audience but forces characters to be incorporated into the stew that until now had played no or completely testimonial role in the plot. Suzume’s aunt and Souta’s friend (the boyfriend-chair) suddenly act like unlikely vehicle for a climax that convulses between deus ex machinas before falling under its own weight. Shinkai’s stories would live better in the extensive format of the series, where they could be equally exciting and believable.

The scaffolding of ‘Suzume’ strives to complete the narratively exciting formula that its script predicts: from the first minute, a subjective view through the tall grass of an abandoned town promises us to have finally abandoned that imperfect world of two-dimensional animation. The body of the camera “removes” stems as if it really weighed, nevertheless maintaining the illustrated naturalism that marks the rest of the film, in 2-D+. 2-D+: too fluid for the industry-standard trained eye, too pretty to render three-dimensional. Luckily, the red tentacles that appear from inside the doors of the Disaster are in charge of reminding us, with their three dimensions generated by a computer and a bit more rudimentary, that if the staging aims only at formalism, sooner or later it will show its pants .

I write this fully aware of the baroque and energizing character of Shinkai’s images, an aesthetic proposal that is sustained from an authorial and generic perspective: after all, melodrama is the genre of violins par excellence. However, I allow myself to raise an eyebrow when realizing that, whatever happens, in the world of ‘Suzume’ everything shines under the same visual, colorful and polished patina, reminiscent of the language of foodporn. Under a meticulously starry sky, any journey through the “undiscovered” corners of the archipelago (far from the crowded Mount Fuji and the temples of Kyoto) will seem like a Japan Railways postcard, to say the least. Can a film that sells its country as an attractive amusement park at the same time dissect the traumatic echoes of the tsunami that devastated it?

Don’t know. I do know, and I affirm this with complete certainty, that Japanese cinema can write more subtle elegies around absence, ruins and trauma (Kiyoshi Kurosawa), images with which, now yes, to maintain enriching conversations over time .

To feed the tourism beast in Japan

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DATA SHEET

Address: makoto shinkai Country: Japan Year: 2023 Release date: 14–4-2023 Gender: Animation Script: makoto shinkai Duration: 122 min.

Synopsis: A 17-year-old girl named Suzume helps a mysterious young man to close the doors of another world, which are causing disasters throughout Japan, assuming the role of Door Sealer.