Suzume Is a Familiar Tale of Mourning from Makoto Shinkai

Makoto Shinkai had already courted comparisons to legendary director Hayao Miyazaki when his 2016 film Your Name. rewrote records—and expectations—for anime around the world. Shinkai’s filmography had come to be characterized by love stories and blue skies, but also by existential threats and apocalyptic events. And from the thematic exploration of severed connection in 5 Centimeters per Second (2007) to the grotesquely beautiful realism of The Garden of Words (2013), Shinkai’s filmography had already done everything it had ever set forth to, realizing the earliest visions of a young animator’s single-handed passion projects. 

Shinkai’s anime has always revolved around similar imagery, themes and characters. While his earlier films were certainly popular in Japan, they never took off elsewhere. Until Your Name. Your Name. may have just been the right order of those individual elements at the right time, but that would ignore the film’s appeal to young Gen Z audiences. The unrelentingly beautiful animation of shooting stars and skylines draws viewers, but the seemingly apocalyptic events permanently altering Japan’s countryside keeps us emotionally invested. Your Name, with its destructive, fate altering comet, was not just an allegory for one of the deadliest, costliest and most powerful natural disasters in history, it is also by far the most well known commentary or reflection on the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. In Suzume, Shinkai goes back to this inflection point in his career and his country. He goes back to 3.11.

Suzume Iwato (Nanoka Hara and Nichole Sakura) is an orphan from Tohoku. The 17-year-old lives in Kyushu with her aunt Tamaki (Eri Fukatsu and Jennifer Sun Bell), when a mysterious and very pretty boy crosses her path looking for a door. Sōta (Hokuto Matsumura and Josh Keaton), a Closer, is on the search for doors in Japan’s many abandoned communities. From onsen towns and amusement parks that didn’t survive recessions, to abandoned schools and buried towns, Sōta closes doors that, left open, invite disaster. 

It’s a ritual closing, a saying goodbye to a place and its people that Shinkai describes as mourning. “Like we mourn the dead at funerals, I thought it was a good idea to write a story of mourning deserted places,” the director explains. “I wanted to write a story of closing and locking the door, and finding a place to start over.” The premise evokes the very real observations of Japan-based writer Richard Lloyd Parry, who in the weeks and months after the earthquake and tsunami reported on the rise in ghost sightings and possessions haunting the region. Suzume’s journey across Japan, which takes her back to the overgrown foundations of her old home, then represents a confrontation with the personal, spiritual and national trauma of 3.11.

At its best, Suzume is a film that imagines modern Japan as a post-apocalyptic setting, evoking the animated beauty and “mono no aware” of pastoral iyashikei like Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou. The spectacle of a Shinkai film is part of what people love about them, and here the best of CoMix Wave Films’ panoply is reserved for grass, ruins and stars. The director’s commitment to the real-world likeness of everything from computers and social media to hamburgers and even feet has always been pointed, but it has never felt so integral to the story he’s telling. The same cannot be said for his screenplay.

More than any other film at his hand, Suzume connects the interpersonal drama at the core of Shinkai’s stories with the apocalyptic backdrop driving the plot. In this middle ground, Suzume comes of age not through a singular act of romantic, world-shaping love, but through connection to others in a found community. Shinkai explores the love of an adoptive mother, Suzume’s aunt Tamaki, and of women across the country who help the young woman on her journey, but all that any of them can talk about is boys. It’s cringeworthy and unrealistic. For all my problems with the post-3.11 fare of 2022’s The House of the Lost on the Cape, its depiction of “sisters, mothers and matriarchs adjacent to masculinized discourses of patriarchal figures like the father and the nation” made important commentary and gave women a believable, if not realistic, voice. 

While Shinkai has always struggled with pacing and exposition, over-relying on montage and writing stories that retread rather than deconstruct his past themes, his habit of leaning on heteronormative scripts of progress, success and happiness is perhaps the most tiresome. Suzume’s central themes do break from this mold in the climax, but the persistence of these logics become more pernicious as Shinkai tries to tell something more grounded in reality. Plus, romantic love is still tacked on. Even though Sōta spends a majority of the film as a three-legged chair and remains enough years older than Suzume to cause pause, there is still some force dragging the two together.

It’s easy to redeploy similar critiques as the director remixes themes and motifs from past works. None of these are complaints unique to Suzume. But Suzume is now the premier depiction of 3.11 in the global mediascape, and after screening at Berlinale—a first for anime since 2002’s Spirited Away—Shinkai is again courting comparisons to a much-beloved Studio Ghibli director. While Shinkai has confessed quite earnestly his desire to revisit the disaster for a generation who was too young, if not yet born, to see the effects it has had on the nation, it was also a disaster that only minimally impacted those in the nation’s economic, political and cultural core. What’s more, the infamous Fukushima nuclear disaster that plagues the region long after the definitive moniker of 3.11 suggests occurred under the misguidance of the Tokyo Electric Power Company, whose Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant ironically provided power to the nation’s capital but not its surrounding Tohoku region. Writing in 2014, Yuko Nishimura argued the 3.11 mediascape “served to conflate diverse regional cultural forms and differences and inadvertently promoted the inequalities and cultural appropriations that had already historically marked the disenfranchisement of the Tohoku peoples by their Tokyo counterparts.” Shinkai himself was in Tokyo at the time of the earthquake, working at CoMix Wave Films. 

In its final act, Suzume returns to Tohoku. The Tokyo skyline gives way to farmland. Abandoned buildings, gates restricting access to areas just off the road, and trucks carrying contaminated soil foretell the final destination of her journey. There is still a magical realism rooted in Japanese folklore underlying the plot of Suzume, but for all the worms and portals, there is even more weight lent to the paper of Suzume’s childhood diary. The record of the day she lost her mother is scribbled out, the page dated in crayon. It’s not as visually stunning as the magical doors that lead to a simulacrous dreamscape—it’s not an embrace in freefall over a city skyline, nor the broken fragment of a falling star—but it’s the closest thing to real that Shinkai and an army of animators have ever made with all their CGI, rotoscoping and handdrawn 2D animation. While parents are seldom found in Shinkai’s films, their exclusion here is felt.

Director: Makoto Shinkai
Writer: Makoto Shinkai
Starring: Nanoka Hara, Hokuto Matsumura, Eri Fukatsu, Shota Sometani, Sairi Ito, Kotone Hanase, Kana Hanazawa, Matsumoto Hakuō II
Release Date: April 14, 2023

Autumn Wright is a freelance games critic and anime journalist. Find their latest writing at @TheAutumnWright.