Review of Suzume

The Subversive Effect of Makoto Shinkai's Works Makoto Shinkai is the antithesis of Hayao Miyazaki, and there will be no synthesis. Because any deviation from the real essence, as captured and expressed, for example, in Miyazaki's works (the original stories of Mononoke Hime and Spirited Away, specifically) leads astray and betrays the roots. Makoto Shinkai's works are like Western devs taking over a Japanese franchise and developing it based on their understanding of the signs and symbols in that franchise, in their own limited, biased, and disconnected perspective, without profound knowledge what the original meaning and purpose of those signs and symbols were. This to a lesser, butperhaps to a more damaging, degree happens in the works of Makoto Shinkai, as it requires prior knowledge in order to spot Shinkai's diluting of the spiritual inheritance and legacy of Japan, since Shinkai himself is Japanese, which can fool a superficial analysis.

Makoto Shinkai is already known as a hack when it comes to plot and structure, an amateur confused for a visionary. Analyzed from the perspective of signs and symbols, Shinkai is also exposed as a philistine imitator, not understanding what he steals, watering down and polluting the cultural trough in the process.

Makoto Shinkai is Japan without the essence of Japan. Feel-good signs abducted from the Spiritual Legacy of the country and its people, cut off from their roots.

Shinkai's works, designed and intended for a global audience, are like wandering Jews without a place to call home. And beneath the innocent visuals they carry a dehumanizing, uprooting, and alienating poison.

Instead of accusing Shinkai of malicious intent, he is, essentially, a product of his generation and environment, which sounds an alarm for the recent state of Japanese culture, proving that it is not immune to the suffocating and corrosive claws of globalism.