On paper, Suzume offers a reasonably compelling, if a rather formulaic narrative. Suzume, a 17 year old high-school girl from a rural town in West Japan is drawn to a mysterious, handsome passerby and inadvertently embarks on a life-altering adventure that will see her travel all over the country in order to prevent a cataclysmic disaster looming over Japan. An initial element of potential romance promptly makes place for a new lighthearted buddy dynamic as the soul of the stranger (Sota, a Tokyo-based graduate student with a penchant for the supernatural -- the story draws heavily from Japanese mythology) is cast into an object of high emotional value to the main character: a small wooden chair crafted by her deceased mother.
Throughout her initial adventures, the protagonist encounters an endearing supernatural cat and a variety of goodhearted locals willing to help her reach her next destination. In the second half of the film, Suzume gains more agency and, rather than having to react to whatever is thrown at her, instead seeks out a grand solution by herself. At that point, the dynamic of the film again shifts, now towards a traditional road movie as Suzume is joined on her journey by her aunt Tamaki (who took her in at a young age after the death of Suzume's mother) and a dubious, yet well-meaning friend of Sota's. As we progress through the story, it furthermore becomes ever so clear that thematically, the film explores themes of recent national trauma and intends to offer its primarily Japanese audience a timeless message of hope, resilience and the inert human power to overcome all adversity -- a praiseworthy message.
In practice, however, there is little doubt that director Makoto Shinkai is again reluctant to deviate from the same structural formula that elevated him to a global household name for Japanese animated films with his 2016 hit Your Name. Although a significant improvement over the abysmal, self-indulging 2019 Weathering with You, Suzume offers very little of substance to back those ambitious themes and is clearly held back by Shinkai's least memorable protagonist yet (held together solely by the vocal lead's best efforts).
Despite ample chance, Suzume's emotions never develop beyond the superficial, highlighting the director's emotionally stunted storytelling and childlike understanding of teenage infatuation: Suzume 'falls in love', and will move heaven and earth to pursue her heart's desires -- even though the object of said 'love' has surprisingly little actual screen time (even in chair form they... share... at best a total of three days in each other's company, most of the time running after the aforementioned cat rather than establishing any believable baseline for romance).
This completely forced and manufactured romantic connection overshadows Suzume's actual trauma and bond with her deceased mother in the film's climax, robbing her and us of any actual emotional payoff, or any semblance of character development. What little we see of the mysterious stranger's human form evokes nothing more than a Wish-ordered budget rendition of Studio Ghibli's classic Howl's Moving Castle lead. "'Mom, can we get Howl's Moving Castle?' 'But honey, we have Howl's Moving Castle at home.'"
(I might be going on a stretch here, but the film and its generic protagonist brought to mind Japanese media scholar Hiroki Azuma's 2001 argument made in his "Otaku: Japan's Database Animals," arguing a new form of cultural production characterized by a focus on collecting, classifying, and remixing cultural elements rather than creating original content: something he coins "database consumption," where individuals create their own personal databases of cultural content that they can draw from and remix as they please, and which is driven by advances in technology, which make it easier to access and manipulate large amounts of cultural data. Perhaps it is not Shinkai's intention to write genuine human emotions, but instead have the audience project our own understanding of the archetypal anime high school girl onto Suzume? Or perhaps I am just reading too much into it and Shinkai has grown too complacent after his 5 Centimeters per Second and The Garden of Words.)
Moreover, some of the more mature jokes (often hilariously involving Suzume sitting or standing on chair-form Sota) clearly reveal that this film is at the very least intended for an audience wider than Suzume's demography (e.g. Families). Yet, any meaningful exploration of the film's various other characters, infinitely more relatable to the audience (or at least, anyone in the audience not a 17 year old high school girl) than Suzume herself, is set aside to move onto the next big story beat.
At one point, Suzume's aunt Tamaki, visibly hurt by Suzume's selfish behavior, lashes out and reveals her inner regret at having missed out on her early adulthood and lack of romantic opportunities due to being pushed into becoming Suzume's caretaker. Suzume does not react, however; instead, this outburst of anger invokes a supernatural occurrence, after which the aunt promptly apologies for her words. Never does Suzume reflect on her relationship with (or what her careless actions might have meant to) Tamaki.
Another missed opportunity is the driver of the car, Tomoyo, who is a suave early-20s urbanite that offers a brief moment of escapism for Tamaki; the playful banter between her and this young man (who could have easily been her type if she were younger) could have given us more insight into her complex reality, but that is unfortunately never further explored and the character is reduced to the archetype anime comic relief. While it may have been less grand in scope, I believe the film could have genuinely been much more compelling if Tamaki and Tomoyo were the actual main characters, as they chase Suzume across the country.
Next, there is the aspect of 'mono no aware' -- a Japanese philosophical and literary concept broadly denoting the aesthetic beauty in understanding the transience of things, memories, life, as well as the feeling of melancholy that it invokes. It is a concept very common to Shinkai's movies and this film is no exception: in dealing with the supernatural phenomena they encounter, the protagonists must travel to abandoned sites in Japan and unravel various memories attached to those locations (including a school and an attraction park). It is a much more in-your-face attempt at using 'mono no aware' as a storytelling device, and, ironically, by refusing to deviate from his established formula, Shinkai has reduced his implementation of this concept to what is at best an empty imitation intended to convey a general sense of 'Japaneseness'.
Indeed, Watching this film brings to mind ongoing discussions on the potential stunting impact of generative language models such as OpenAI's GPT-based chatGPT and DALL-E on human creativity. Those fears are clearly unfounded, as both this film (and Shinkai's previous Weathering with You) are already what I would expect a lifeless AI to come up with when asked to generate an animated teenage love story with light, supernatural Shintoist themes to invoke both maximum Emotion Per Minute and optimal Japaneseness™, yet the film still easily found its way among the most popular and highest-grossing films of the year in Japan.
The team behind the film is clearly technically highly capable, scene after scene delivering almost unseen levels of production value in Japanese animation. Nevertheless, for the majority of the film, I found it entirely lacking in actual style and not once coming close to the artistry delivered by either Studio Ghibli, or even Shinkai's contemporary, film director Mamoru Hosoda. Yet, simultaneously I also can't deny that the film is at times genuinely funny, and that, most of the time, I was actually quite entertained. Moreover, a handful of scenes exploring the daily lives of Tokyoites in the final act do genuinely remind us that Shinkai is capable of more than rendering glossy, faux nostalgia-inducing animated depictions of rural Japan accompanied with cookie-cutter emotional compositions by Japanese rock-band Radwimps.
(Watched the international premiere in Berlin, where it competed in the Berlinale International Film Festival)