Suzume

 Suzume (すずめの戸締まり) is a feature length coming of age fantasy movie by Shinkai Makoto.  The original theatrical release was in November of 2022.

    Iwato Suzume is a junior in high school in a small sleepy village in Kyushu.  On her way to school one day she encounters a hansom stranger who asks her if there are any ruins with a door nearby.  The only thing she can think of is an abandoned resort in the hills outside of town.  She heads off to school, but something about the man pulls at her and she turns around, heading to the resort.  Once there she doesn't see any sign of the man but does see a strange free standing door.  Curious, she opens it, to find a vast landscape blanketed in the night sky beyond.  Entranced by the strange scenery she crosses the threshold only to pass through still in the ruins of the resort.  She crosses through again, still able to see the strange world through the door, but still remains in the hills outside of her town.  She stumbles on a strange statue embedded in the floor.  After pulling the object out it suddenly changes into a mangy cat and runs off.  Disturbed by the occurrences, she speeds back to school and sanity.

    Late to school, her friends question her disappearance but are interrupted with an earthquake warning on their cellphones.  Suzume notices black smoke coming from the hills and tries to point it out to her friends, but they are unable to see it.  As her concern grows, the smoke increases and begins to take the form of a snake.  Something about this is not natural and makes Suzume uneasy, particularly as she is the only one that appears to see it.  Suspecting it is related to what she found at the abandoned resort she rushes out of school.  Her suspicion proves correct and the growing black form in the sky is pouring out of the door she left open.  In the swirling darkness she sees the stranger, struggling to close the door.  With her help they are able to close it and the man uses a glowing key to 'lock' the door.  But they aren't quick enough, the black form has crashed to the earth, causing an earthquake to cause damage to the town.

    Suzume brings the man back to her house to threat a wound he received on his arm in the process of closing the door.  The town is shaken but it appears there was no real damage or injury.   As she is treating his wounds the man tells her his name, Munakata Souta, and that he is a 'closer'.  Closers are responsible for finding and sealing such doors across the country to prevent the giant worms from causing earthquakes.  As they chat, the strange cat appears, surprising them by speaking and instantly transferring Souta's consciousness into a small three legged chair from Suzume's youth.  The cat leaps away, with Souta (the chair) followed by Suzume, scrambling to catch it.  The chase brings them onboard of ferry that is departing from the town.  Before they can capture it, the cat leaps off of the boat, to the safety of a passing vessel.  Suzume and Souta in for a journey they can't stop, spending the time to formulate a plan.  The ferry will arrive in Ehime, hours away.

    Souta explains that along with the doors and the closers who track them, there are two keystones that are used to strengthen the seal between the real world and the world beyond the doors.  Souta suspects that the strange cat is one of the keystones, that has become unstuck from its defensive position.  He fears that the other keystone will not be strong enough to hold back the other side and the destruction it brings with it.  He has to capture the strange cat and find a way to restore it.  He hopes that doing so will also lift the curse it placed on him, turning him into Suzume's chair.  He doesn't want Suzume to join him, instructing her to take the return ferry back home, but she refuses, recognizing how impassible the task would be for an animate chair.  Before he can argue about it, she notices their cat has become popular in postings on Line.  Distracted by the chase, he puts his concerns behind him and they head off to follow the cat through the sudden stream of photos with it, the internet having named the cat Daijin.   

    It is a race against time as they chase the keystone across the country, closing doors it opens along the way and relying on the kindness of strangers to keep the chase going.  All the while, Suzume's guardian and aunt, is going crazy with grief at the girl she has been raising suddenly changing and running away from home.  Suzume understands any real excuses she could give her aunt wouldn't make any sense, but she doesn't have time to think about that, fearing her actions will bring great ruin and death to the country.  Something about the door and the world beyond reminds her of the time when her mother died, when she was four years old, a time that exists far into her memory and dreams.  These feelings drive her forward, coupled with her sense of quilt and responsibility, pushing forward until the task at hand is completed and she can return to her normal life.

    I regret not seeing this amazingly beautiful movie in the theaters when I had the chance...twice now!  I know better than to skip Shinaki films on the big screen as they are all amazingly crafted.  This is the most blatantly super natural of all of his films.  It is also the closest of his films to resemble a Studio Ghibli movie.  I have long disliked the idea that Shinkai has been frequently labeled the new Miyazaki.  Shinkai's films focus on personal relationships and feelings of loneliness and longing.  Miyazaki crafts, mostly, fantastical stories as veiled warnings for real world problems.  I consider Hosoda Mamoru to be more in line with the Miyazaki style.  Yet Suzume is very very Ghibli in style and story.  A fantastical allegory typing the great tragedies of Japan to a supernatural phenomena, which in its self is tied to personal responsibilities of a few individuals.  This is his letter of compassion to the victims and survivors of the Touhoku earthquake in March of 2011.

    As with every other film by him, this is strikingly animated, with realistic backgrounds and directing.  He and his team, truly make the best looking films of the 21st century, in my opinion.  Always focusing on unnaturally vivid and beautiful landscapes and skies.  All of his movies seem like love letters to the wild and quiet spaces of Japan.  Beginning with Your Name, the narrative of Shinkai's films have moved from lose and melancholy to hope and growth.  While I do savor depressing, tear jerk-er, drama's its better to see a sense of hope in his stories.  I suspect the changes in his personal life over the years have influenced the stories he tells.  Regardless of his themes being less suicidal in tone, they always share a common theme of the hero's path.  Shinkai's characters in many of his films find themselves unwittingly thrust into journeys that only they can take, with uncertain outcomes, only driven by their own conviction.  It was very stark and apparent with Suzume that this was truly a heroes journey style story when the title character, against all odds and sense of self preservation, is doing everything they can to prevent turmoil and destruction.  Suzume and Weathering With You are a shift in narration for him...not discounting Children Who Chase Lost Voices.  He may actually begin to resemble the mantle thrust on him years ago as the new Miyazaki.  Time will tell, but I will always welcome more beauty from him.

    Suzume is readily available in physical and digital formats as well as currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Weathering With You

 Weathering With You (天気の子) is a theatrical supernatural drama by Shinkai Mokoto.  The film originally played in theaters in Japan in 2019 and North America in 2020.

    The films begins with runaway high school student Morishima Hodaka attempting to start a new lie for himself in Tokyo.  During the boat ride to Tokyo he is saved by a suspicious man named Suga Keisuke during a freak storm.  After struggling to survive on his own, with no ID or place to work he shows up at Suga's business.  Suga runs a small time magazine specializing in super natural phenomenon.  At this time Tokyo is experiencing continuous rain and the magazine decides to investigate any supernatural reasons behind the wet weather.  The investigation leads them to a legend of a 'sunshine girl' who has the ability to stop the rain.

    Hodaka ends up rescuing a girl from two men wanting to recruit her to work at their hostess bar  The girl, Amano Hina, worked at a McDonalds that Hodaka frequented before working for Suga.  In their escape from the men, they end up at a secret shrine on the roof of an abandoned building.  Hina confesses to Hodaka that she can pray to make the rain stop.  Seizing on the research he was a pat of he convinces her that she is the Sunshine Girl.  They start up an online business selling her powers to momentarily stop the rain to anyone willing to pay.  But what will it take to actually break the cursed weather system plaguing Tokyo?

    The story is a slight departure from his previous works and actually felt more like a Hosoda Mamoru movie than a Shinkai one in some aspects.  The central idea revolves around the main characters who are running away from themselves and treat of reality snapping them back into place.  Yet they don't fear the eventual repercussions for their actions and act outside of the rules of society.  They are all outcasts in their own right and are joined together through fate alone, a fate that is driving them to change things for better or worse around them.  Yet they are solely focused on the now and nor the future ahead of them.  The characters are all fleshed out enough to make them compelling and the story interesting enough outside of its relentless forward movement.

    I have been a fanboy for Shinkai since Voices of a Distant Star, so it's really no surprise that I really enjoyed this film.  Though this one felt a bit different than most of his previous works, which tend to have a heavy air of melancholy.  Weathering With You was actually upbeat and humorous at times though still laced with his typical sense of impending doom.  The artwork is his typical immaculate and realistic style.  But by this point in his catalog is actually not as impressive...it's strange.  Overall, the movie was enjoyable and recommended for fans of Shinkai or anime in general.  Unlike Your Name, I don't feel compelled to expose non-anime viewers to this one as much.

    The film was released in America by GKids and is available streaming and on disc.

Your Name

Your Name (君の名は) is a super natural romantic comedy feature by Shinkai Makoto.  The film was originally released in Japan in 2016 and received a wide release in English speaking countries in 2017.

    Miyamizu Mitsuha is an average high school student in a sleepy western Japanese town.  She and her younger sister live with their grandmother and help run the family shrine.  Mitsuha wakes one day to a strange sensation which only becomes more disorientating when everyone comments on her off behavior the previous day, a day she cannot recall.  The following day she awakens to an even stranger sensation as she finds herself in the body of a boy around her age who lives in Tokyo.

    Mitsuha does her best to live normally as Tachibana Taki but is quite overwhelmed with his life in the nation’s capital, a life she has been dreaming of.  Part of her thinks she is dreaming but another part of her believes that she is inhabiting the body of this other person.  Her previous and, unknown to her, strange behavior may be the result of Taki being in her body at the same time.  To test her theory, she leaves signs for him of what is happening.

    The following day she returns to her body to find that Taki had come to a similar conclusion while in her body.  As they continue to switch bodies and slightly alter the other person’s life they try to work out a system to keep the damage at a minimum and prevent any unsightly alterations.  Instead of trying to understand the reasons behind the constant switching they both work improving the life of their host body in ways they feel are best.  When Taki realizes, he is falling in love with Mitsuha they stop switching places and are unable to communicate in any way.  He decides to find her in person to understand what is going on and to talk with her, he may not be prepared for the reality he is about to enter.

    As with pretty much everything Shinkai has directed, Your Name is a beautifully detailed love letter to life and our course through it.  But with everything he has done it is overlain with a strong sense of lost connection to people who are closest to us.  Mitsuha struggles with her rural living, her duties as a shrine maiden and her estranged father.  She doesn't know what the future holds for her but she knows she wants to leave the village and move to Tokyo, as generation after generation of youths do.  Taki is quite comfortable in his life but struggles with being brash and quick to action.  He has an idea of where he wants to end up but now his life is too hectic for him to enjoy himself.

    The story is broken into a few parts, with the first part being informative and comedic, as the two establish their cross-body rapport and the viewer is taken through their attempts at normalization.  There are several segments that made me think of the more comical scenes Mamoru Hosoda has used in his films.  The next segment is where the comedy comes to a grinding halt and harsh reality sets in, like a comet strike.  It is a more pronounced starkness than we typically see from Shinkai but brings the film to an entirely new level, a level of overwhelming dread and anxiety.  Dread and anxiety transitions into more familiar Shinkai territory in the final segment, a territory of resigned solitude and regret.  Fate is accepted and the characters bow down to its unwavering control.  The ending segment of 5cm per Second is prime example of this territory.  Yet Shinkai does something he hasn't done before and this may be part of why Your Name has become the most successful anime movie in history.  Something I will leave to people who have not seen the movie to experience on their own.

   I admit wholly that I am a Shinkai fan-boy.  I resisted watching pirated copies of this movie for a long time, wanting to experience it first in the theater when it finally came to America and I was not disappointed.  The film though is a little more simplistic than I would have liked to see.  Some of the super natural elements seemed like a last resort to keep the story moving forward in a meaningful way, but in the end, it did its job, even though I feel it was a little cheap.  Over all the story is moving and the characters are relatable in a way that helps to captivate the audience.  Shinkai builds worlds based almost solely on his character’s emotions and inner mechanisms, polished to a mesmerizing glow with stunning animation.  Some viewers looking for more of an adventure type story from the movie, demanding the characters go on a life affirming mission to understand their situation.  Instead the journey is in the characters themselves and could easily have been done in the context of a chatroom, with Taki and Mitsuha communicating over 2chan.

    The movie was licensed by Funimation in North America but there is not work yet on a disc release.  What I am really interested in is if there will be a tranlation of the novalization in English.