Review of Suzume

My wife and I saw this in theaters last night. The fact that she and I were among just nine total people there for that movie on the second night it's available for viewing really speaks to how far anime movies, and anime as a whole, still has to go here in the United States, but that's a discussion for another day. If you take a peek at my profile, specifically the favorites section, you'll find a Shinkai movie among my all time favorites, several others rated highly on my list and Shinkai himself listed among my favorite anime-associated characters and people. Plainly, I'm a genuinefan, and I've had nothing but positive experiences with his movies up to this point. This was, while certainly not a crappy movie by any objective measure, far from his best work.

Shinkai has been, and continues to be, the absolute gold standard for visual presentation. He's simply the best in the business at what he does. It would be very difficult for this movie to look or sound better. The presentation is simply exceptional, the best of the best, the gold standard. Sky high production values, extreme attention to detail and extreme care put into every single shot summarizes the entirety of this film. Reserving the tiniest of nitpicks for the use of CGI, which some people will hate no matter how well it's done, the presentation here is as close to perfect as perfect can get with the technology available in 2023.

When you get beyond how stunningly good the film looks and sounds, however, the rest of what you're left with is average and forgettable in almost every way. This film is fully, utterly, entirely carried by its presentation. The plot and characters have a lot of problems. The plot itself is formulaic, predictable and not unlike other works we've seen before. ALL characters, very much including the leads, are underdeveloped, with the male lead in particular having few lines, little depth and little backstory and the romance between the leads does not feel organic whatsoever. They've known each other for all of a week when our female lead has fallen unquestioningly, unwaveringly in love with the male lead and she will stop at nothing to save him! The relationship between these two characters fell very flat for me.

This film somehow manages to feel simultaneously very much like and very much unlike previous Shinkai works, and unfortunately it's in a bad way in both cases. On one hand this feels unoriginal in that it looks and feels like a lot of what we've seen before from this creator with recurring themes such as time travel and some form of magic/supernatural ability to prevent natural disaster (this is the THIRD FILM IN A ROW this is applicable to and it's frankly a bit stale at this point), romantic relationships with significant age gaps and a forced message of hope, appreciation and moving forward regardless of what has happened to you. Also, female lead Suzume and Your Name's female lead Mitsuha look very visually similar to me and probably could have swapped movies without me noticing. On the other hand, where Shinkai's strengths in the past in films such as The Garden of Words and 5 Centimeters Per Second have been believable, realistic interpersonal relationships on a smaller scale- relationships with no magical element that could actually happen in the real world- Shinkai makes the puzzling choice this time around to stray significantly further away from intimate and interpersonal and lean far more heavily into fantasy and spectacle, a decision that cuts off his greatest strength as a writer and did him absolutely no favors in this film, perhaps exposing a weakness of his as a writer.

I feel strongly that this film, if you were to strip away the production values and make it look like any other average anime in 2023, would land as a 6 at very best. It's a generic fantasy romp with forced plot elements, underdeveloped and forgettable characters and a pretty neat and convenient ending, and that's to say nothing of how convenient it is that seemingly no one in the world witnessing the various events of the film, such as a cat literally talking to them, seems to think very much of it and is able to brush it off without further questioning. I don't know about you, but if I came home from work one of these days and my cat walked up to me and said "Hey man, how was your day?" my reaction probably wouldn't be mildly surprised for a few moments, don't ask or think about it any further and carry on from there as I would on any other night.

At the end of the day I can understand why the scores for this film are as high as they are. It's shiny and new, there's a lot of Shinkai fans out there (absolutely including myself) and if you saw this in theaters it's very easy to get swept up in the immersive, cinematic experience this is very clearly intended to be. However, bells and whistles removed, this is a disappointing effort, and too similar to his two most recent works, from a creator frequently mentioned in the greatest of all time discussion. My sincere hope is Shinkai avoids natural disasters being prevented through the power of love and time travel in his next outing and gives us something fresher and less samey. Keep up how good it looks, but put more effort into character development and writing. If this didn't look so damn good, I'd be utterly disappointed as opposed to where I am now, which is somewhere in the vicinity of lukewarm.

OBJECTIVE RATING- 7-8
PERSONAL ENJOYMENT RATING- 7.5