Makoto Shinkai’s “Suzume,” becomes the fourth highest-grossing anime ever. Photo Courtesy of “Suzume.”
By Leah Quintero, Managing Editor
There is a line in the recently released anime film, “Suzume” that perfectly captures what the main protagonist’s perilous journey is all about: discovering a will to live and a reason to survive even when hope seems impossible.
“I know that life is fleeting. We live side-by-side with death. Even then…once more…even for just one moment more, we wish to live,” is what Shouta Munakata shouts as he and Suzume Iwato call on the gods for help before the supernatural “worm” wreaking havoc on Japan escapes into the world of the living.
As a story that takes place in Japan, a place ridden with natural tragedies and the like, finding hope in the hopeless is exactly what director Makoto Shinkai had in mind when he decided to base “Suzume” on one of Japan’s most devastating earthquakes, the 2011 Tohoku earthquakes that took the lives of 15,000 people.
At first glance, viewers may be convinced that the film will be about a romance between a young girl and a man who mysteriously turns into a chair. In reality, it’s more than that.
In an interview with Crunchyroll, Shinkai explains that he had a hard time determining whether it was ethical for him to depict a factual tragedy in an entertainment film. However, after much deliberation, he decided to go through with it.
“I thought it could connect the generation that knows it and the one that does not,” he said. “Suzume was made with the idea of connecting the younger and older generations of Japan. If it could also bring together the audience in Japan and the world, I couldn’t be happier.”
And after becoming the fourth highest-grossing anime film, surpassing “One Piece Film: Red” at the box office in five months’ time, it has done just that.
Released in Japan in November 2022, the story follows Suzume, a young girl forced to live with the grief caused by the Tohoku earthquakes that took her mother’s life when she was only four years old. At the beginning of the film, Suzume is on her way to school when she runs into a university student, Shouta, who suddenly asks her where the closest abandoned location is. It’s after their brief conversation and Suzume’s ever-growing curiosity that leads her to see the supernatural being threatening to upend her life. When Shouta is rendered useless by a seemingly evil cat and turned into a chair, their adventure to close the doors connecting the past with the present and return Shouta to his normal state, begins.
Shinkai has a reputation for bringing awareness to global warming through his films. For instance, his 2019 project, “Weathering With You,” focuses on the unprecedented rains, typhoons and other climate crises in Japan to create this dramatic fantasy.
In “Weathering With You,” instead of avoiding and hiding from the disasters taking place, Shinkai allows the characters to embrace it, giving them the chance to face the issue together.
“Suzume” acts in a similar way. Shouta is fairly adamant about closing the doors by himself but when he realizes that that is not possible in his new body, he accepts Suzume’s help bringing the two together.
Like many of Shinkai’s films, there is a light sprinkle of romance featured in the film. Although, despite how much the trailer focuses on Suzume and Shouta’s tender moments, that’s not the only place love seems to flourish here.
It appears in the people Suzume meets along her journey. From Chika Amabe, to Suzume’s aunt Tamaki Iwato, who has raised her since she was young, there wasn’t a time when Suzume wasn’t shrouded in love.
Seeing it all come together full circle until the very last moment when Suzume realizes that a happy future is attainable, drives home just how well those feelings were conveyed.
