Suzume - Makoto Shinkai did it Again!

So this movie was getting a lot of hype in various social media and even the director's name was trending for a while in Indonesia when it was released on Wednesday. But as it was now increasingly challenging for me to see a movie on weekdays, I decided to see this one last night.  My wife was willing to accompany after I convinced her this would likely be a great movie as it was directed by Makoto Shinkai. OK then, let's get right to the movie.

Brief Story Line

Suzume (Nanoka Hara - Night Doctor TV series etc) was a high school girl living in the small town of Kyushu with her aunt Tamaki (Eri Fukatsu - Survival Family etc) since 4 years old. One day as she was going to school, she met with a guy later on revealed to be Souta (Hokuto Matsumura - xxxHolic etc) who was looking for a door in ruins. Suzume would then be caught up in something that Souta had been doing for some time and she had no choice but to help him close doors across Japan to avoid disasters.

So what would happen to Suzume? You could find out in this movie.

End of Brief Story Line

Well like other works of Makoto Shinkai, this movie was also having a fantasy element and a bit of unusual plot. This time, the focus was on the teenage Suzume who unexpectedly met a young man who would change her life forever. It started innocently enough, but did not take long before she found out what Souta was doing. The story was not that difficult to understand as it moved on a steady pace with some humorous scenes, especially after that cat called Daijin appeared and did something.

The movie then felt more like a road trip as Suzume went from her home town through various cities and ended up in Tokyo. It was really delightful looking at her experiencing all these stuff as she met with different kind of people along the way, and some scenes were funny as well. But the best part had always been the relationship built between Suzume and Souta, plus obviously the suspense whenever they were trying to close those doors.

This film had a duration of 121 minutes which did not feel long at all as we enjoyed the adventure and also the lovely scenery of Japan that were animated beautifully and realistically. The characters were very engaging and even those who appeared briefly left a good impression too. Other than those names I mentioned above, there were support cast like Shota Sometani (Detective Chinatown 3 etc) as Tamaki's colleague Minoru, Ryunosuke Kamiki (Your Name etc) as Souta's best friend Serizawa and few others who were all very interesting.

In addition to the amazing animation, the film also had wonderful background music with one song in particular titled Suzume sung by Radwimps featuring Toaka which had become my wife's favorite for a while now. There was also another song that sounded very nice during the closing credit and after reading on the internet, I found it was sung by the same band and its title was Kanata Haluka. Radwimps had provided background score for Your Name and Weathering With You, so they seemed to be able to translate what Shinkai wanted to express in his movies.

Overall this was an entertaining movie about an emotional road trip of teenage girl on a saving-the-world mission, accompanied by an unusual partner. It had a great finale that affected me and my wife, and still manage to surprise me just like in Makoto Shinkai's previous works. Oh, I read that he was influenced by one of Studio Ghibli's movie Kiki's Delivery Service and other films, which would confirm my wife's intuition as she had a strong Ghibli's feel when seeing this movie. So if you are fans of Shinkai's films, then I am sure you would love this too as it still gave the same feel-good feeling after watching this. 

Mike's movie moments rating: 4 out of 5 stars