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Shinkai’s love for Hayao Miyazaki and his approach to fantastical adventure storytelling is palpable and visible all throughout Suzume. But narratively, it shines through most brightly in the way that Suzume’s chance encounter with Sōta brings her face-to-face with a door to another dimension — and a trickster cat deity called Daijin (Ann Yamane, Lena Josephine Marano) who’s more than happy to leave the door open and let the worm monster try to cross over into Japan. In one of Suzume’s first shifts toward action that really speaks to how wondrously studio CoMix Wave Films is able to bring Shinkai’s ideas to life, there’s barely any time for Sōta to explain what the worm is or how he’s part of a long line of “closers” who’ve worked to keep its tendrils from crashing into the Earth and causing earthquakes. Suzume’s a quick enough student, though, and after she and Sōta manage to close the first portal, it isn’t long before she decides that she absolutely needs to accompany him on his journey to close more of them and make Daijin return to his post as a guardian keystone statue. In the same way that it was easy to read Shinkai’s Weathering With You as a reflection of what it means to live in a world upended by extreme climate change, in Suzume, you can clearly see Shinkai grappling with the Great East Japan earthquake of 2011 that killed nearly 20,000 people, injured thousands more, and caused catastrophic damage across the country. Though Suzume never feels fatalistic or at risk of becoming lost in the darkness of its metaphor, it also never lets you forget that each and every single instance of the worm bursting through a portal carries the risk of causing a calamity like the real-world 2011 quake. But one of the most powerful concepts woven throughout the film is how the key to keeping the darkness at bay isn’t preparedness or simply responding with magical force but, rather, holding space and having a deep reverence for the past and all it can teach us about the present. There’s a certain degree of random and somewhat twee energy coursing through Suzume as it’s first laying out the series of events that leaves Sōta transformed into a walking, talking, child-size chair who needs Suzume’s help tracking Daijin across Japan’s various islands. But there’s a subtle brilliance to the way the movie uses the duo’s journey to illustrate different facets of its larger ideas about the past, memory, and growing up. In Suzume, Shinkai’s signature use of oversaturated colors and playing with light to give natural settings an almost otherworldly splendor is in full force. Here, though, it works more to emphasize the beauty there is to be found in everyday, ordinary places and happenings when people slow down to appreciate them as the things that make life worth living.
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