Review of Suzume

I’ll admit I’ve largely been indifferent with Makoto Shinkai works with the man’s habit of continuing to rehash the same storytelling premise with his films involving long-distance relationships, many of which involving some sort of paranormal element. It looked like his latest film, Suzume, was an attempt to break out of this habit with the titular character meeting a young man named Souta Munakata trying to prevent a supernatural powered “worm” from entering our world via doorways that open up a parallel world. Suzume and Souta team up to combat this threat, while more about these supernatural elements are explored and Suzume coming to learnof her own connections to them.

Before I get into too critical, I guess let’s get the usual out of the way with a Shinkai film in praising Suzume’s visuals. Makoto Shinkai’s films typically offer up beautiful and highly-detailed scenic shots and well-animated movement and sequences that play out. Suzume’s no different in that department with exploring both the normal and parallel worlds that Suzume and Souta find themselves traveling between to deal with the “worm” threat and having its moments of fluid and nicely animated sequences as the two go about their ordeals.

As far as the storytelling and themes for the film go, I must admit their execution leaves much to be desired. In essence, it felt like the film was attempting to try to do too much within the limited time of its two hour run. The first hour largely focuses on Suzume and Souta’s travels to different Japanese locales to locate the different doors that the “worm” is attempting to get into our world from. A few of them have Suzume become acquainted with one of the residents in each locale that she befriends. While this narrative could have worked within a TV anime that would have more time to explore a larger story, Suzume lacks this time as we get little time to connect with these new characters to make Suzume’s bonds with them come off genuine. Not to mention there’s little breathing room with Suzume quickly thrust into her present circumstances right within the film’s first several minutes.

By the second hour, the film attempts to have emotional drama with its story exploring Suzume’s connections to the parallel world and trying to implement a coming of age moral with it. Unfortunately, this story element felt largely shoehorned into the film by this point with the lack of focus on it in the film’s first hour. The same issues also come into play with the film’s sloppy addition of its romance angle and one character’s inconsistent motives in their interactions with our lead characters.

With Suzume’s rather significant flaws with its storytelling focus and having a vision too grand for a two hour film, I’d say it is easily the weakest quality Shinkai film I’ve seen to date. Even with my gripes on Shinkai’s typical storytelling approach with his films, the past ones at least took their time to focus on and explore their characters and story to at least have you give somewhat of a hoot about their developments. But in Suzume’s case, it felt too unfocused and tried doing too much with what it wanted to dabble into.