Suzume
Even though Shinkai has been often called "The New Miyazaki" (a title Shinkai himself calls an "overestimation"), his movies are certainly considerably different in many ways from the works of Studio Ghibli. For one thing, Shinkai's works feature a much more epic and modern animation style featuring a mix of hand-drawn animation and 3D CGI, favoring hyper-real backgrounds, bright colors, and lots of sunlight reflecting off of water. Shinkai's stories are often more melodramatic, and maybe fit into a category of teen romance that we might call Young Adult over in the U.S.
Suzume fits comfortably alongside Shinkai's last few movies, again telling a romance of sorts between a pair of young people trying to prevent a magical apocalyptic event. High school student Suzume passes by the hot and mysterious Sōta on her way to school one morning and is quickly enamored with him based on their maybe 45-second meeting. She follows him into the woods, where she then proceeds to accidentally get involved in a secret cosmic struggle to keep giant Lovecraftian worms from entering our reality and triggering city-destroying earthquakes. What can you do, these things happen, right?
Things proceed to get wacky, as a cat (who may be some kind of weather god) turns Sōta into a chair. That's right, for almost the entirety of the movie, Sōta is a walking, talking three-legged chair. Suzume carries it around Japan with her as she tries to uncover the truth about what's really going on and also somehow deepens her relationship with chair-Sōta. It leads to some pretty inspired comedic moments, including several dramatic chase scenes where the hilariously well-rendered chair is sprinting and jumping around like an action hero. It sounds ridiculous (and is) but it's all very goofily endearing and almost starts to feel pretty normal within the context of the movie.
Shinkai’s movies often relate to real-life environmental issues and the power of nature. In Suzume, the movie explores the abandoned cities and various haikyo (“ruins”) around Japan, such as areas left devasted by the real-life earthquake and resulting tsunami of March 2011. Our heroes are confronted with the same trauma and anxieties as the people of Japan, or anyone living in similarly affected areas. Their adventure is almost a work of wish fulfillment, as they are given a chance to "heal" those impacted sites and prevent further destruction of the land. It's a great way to ground a fantastical story with some realistic and relatable stakes.
However, for a movie with this wild of a plot, it's a shame that things kind of peter out by the end. There's a lengthy road trip segment in the back half which is fun in its own right, but it really saps a lot of the story's momentum and starts to make you feel the two-hour runtime. It's almost as if they were trying to mimic the quieter downtime moments of the Ghibli movies, but didn't get the pacing quite right. The "romance" is also pretty one-sided by design, removing a lot of the emotional impact of the central relationship; the movie instead tries to lean on some musings about grief and an exploration and climactic revelation of Suzume's hidden childhood trauma, but those parts are a little too spread out to have much effect.
As an overall production, Suzume looks great and has some good ideas and a few good laughs, but it's hard to escape the feeling that Shinkai is treading water a bit. If this is your first Shinkai, you might come away feeling more impressed, but you'll start to notice familiar story beats once you go back to his other movies. It's still a fun and entertaining time, but hopefully Shinkai mixes it up a little bit more on his next go around.
