Review of Suzume

Can you sympathise with a chair, really? the short answer is yes. yes, you can. if you want the long answer, settle in. At first, I was sure this movie would be in my watchlist for ages because the last movie of the director didn’t really impress me that much. Then I got bored and scrolled through Netflix and well, I gave it a try. So glad I did! It really is a wonderful movie. I gotta compare this movie to another non-anime related movie that cane out at the same time; Disneys Wish. The movie was the 100th year celebration movie where you would imaginethe story to be groundbreaking. This was not the case and Suzume did everything right that Wish did bad. Or so to say.

The characters were similar to Wish. You have one main character, a side character of higher interest and a bunch of others that just appeared in the movie. Here we have a good example of how side characters are portrayed right and were made interesting enough to continue the movie. I loved the main character a lot. She was nice and so ambitious which is barely even seen in movies nowadays. It‘s easy to loose such characters and cut them off as boring. (Again which was the case in Wish) I am honestly a bit surprised that they turned the boy into a chair. But. They. Made. It. Work.
(Oh god I was rooting for a whole chair lmao)

Story-wise, this was insane. I was afraid they’d loose me in the first half of the movie but then everything happened so fast that you couldn’t close the screen. Even the whole roadtrip scene was strangely entertaining and I felt the second-hand embarrassment through the TV. {A good movie makes you feel other emotions than just joy.} I also adored how much fantasy the creators put in the movie. It was creative and finally not something recycled.

I cannot begin on how good the animation was because that would take me hours to even comprehend.

I‘d recommend this to anyone who is a fan of Ghibli. The worldbuilding and fantasy aspects in modern japan just felt similar to it. They also used a nice factor of morally grey characters where you couldn’t even hate the cat, for instance. It was a nice touch on perspective.

The only problem I had with the movie was that I just couldn’t really connect to the characters. Even though death was nicely portrayed I felt like there was a lack of emotion there. I couldn’t even pinpoint the exact reason why, though. Maybe someone else can.