Suzume (2022) Review: Closing Doors on a Nation's Grief

Is Suzume worth watching?

Yes. Suzume is a gorgeous, big-hearted anime road movie that uses a playful fantasy premise to approach something much heavier: how a country lives with the memory of disaster. Makoto Shinkai’s images are as ravishing as ever, and the film’s mix of comedy, adventure and grief is often deeply affecting. The reservations are a romance that never quite convinces and a storytelling template that anyone who has seen Your Name will recognise.

What is Suzume about?

Suzume Iwato (Nanoka Hara) is a 17-year-old girl living with her aunt in a quiet town in southern Japan; she lost her mother when she was very young. On her way to school one morning, she meets a mysterious young man, Souta (Hokuto Matsumura), who is searching for an abandoned door. Her curiosity unleashes a calamity, and she learns that doors hidden in ruined places across Japan must be closed to keep disaster at bay. Soon she is travelling across the country on a mission to set things right, in the company of a companion who has been transformed, quite literally, into a child’s three-legged chair.

Suzume is written and directed by Makoto Shinkai. It is a Japanese-language animated feature that runs 122 minutes, released in Japan in November 2022. It later competed at the Berlin Film Festival, a rare honour for an anime feature. Eri Fukatsu voices Suzume’s aunt, Tamaki.

A road trip through a wounded country

The structure is a journey, and it is the film’s smartest idea. Suzume travels through towns and landscapes marked by abandonment or past catastrophe, and each stop introduces kind strangers who help her along the way. These interludes are warm, funny and specific, and they give the film a texture of everyday Japanese life that balances the supernatural stakes.

Underneath the adventure lies a serious subject. Suzume is Shinkai’s most direct engagement with the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in north-eastern Japan, and the film treats that memory with care. Its doors to abandoned places become a quiet way of honouring what was lost, and the emotional power builds steadily towards its later chapters without ever turning the tragedy into spectacle.

Shinkai’s images, and a chair with personality

Visually, the film is a knockout. Shinkai’s trademark skies, light and weather are here in abundance, and the sequences involving the colossal force behind the doors have genuine scale and menace. The animation of everyday detail, a ferry deck, a small-town bar, a busy Tokyo street, is just as rich.

The film is also far funnier than its premise suggests, largely thanks to the chair. The sight of a tiny wooden chair scampering, sulking and leaping into action is an inspired comic invention, and it gives the adventure a lightness that keeps it from sinking under its themes. A mischievous white cat adds further chaos. The score, by the band Radwimps with Kazuma Jinnouchi, swells effectively, though at times it tells viewers what to feel a little too insistently.

Where the formula shows

Shinkai has now made three films in a row around a similar shape: a teenage bond, a supernatural catastrophe and a connection to real-life trauma. Suzume is arguably the most mature of them, but it also feels the most familiar. The central romance is the weakest thread, sketched quickly and asked to carry more weight than it can. The mythology is explained in bursts of exposition that interrupt the journey’s rhythm, and the final stretch leans hard on sentiment.

Who should watch Suzume?

It suits anime fans, admirers of Your Name and other Shinkai films, and anyone looking for a visually rich fantasy with emotional depth. It works well for families with older children and teenagers, though themes of grief, loss and natural disaster run throughout, and some sequences depict earthquakes in ways that may be upsetting for viewers with direct experience of them. At just over two hours, it is a full but well-paced evening.

Where to go next:

• Your Name, Shinkai’s breakthrough, for the richer romance at the heart of the same storytelling formula.
• Spirited Away, Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece, for another girl’s journey through a fantastical, hidden Japan.
• The Boy and the Heron, for a more enigmatic anime fantasy about grief and a lost mother.

The verdict

Suzume is a visually stunning, emotionally generous film that finds a fresh, gentle way to talk about national trauma through a teenager’s adventure. Its romance is underpowered and its formula familiar, but its images, humour and quiet compassion make it one of Makoto Shinkai’s most satisfying films.

Rating: 4/5