Suzume review: An epic fantasy love story between a girl and a talking chair

Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name. (2016) and Weathering With You (2019) brilliantly weave together troubled teen romance and apocalyptic stakes, literally turning young love into exactly what it feels like to the people experiencing it: the most important thing in the world. Your Name. sets up the relationship between its two leads as the one thing that can avert a disaster, and Weathering With You pulls the opposite trick—its two main characters choose to love even in the face of unavoidable cosmic horror. What, that film asks, is the point of saving the world if it requires you to sacrifice everything that makes the world good in the first place?

Suzume, written and directed by Shinkai, insists on having it both ways, resulting in a film that doesn’t quite have the emotional punch of its predecessors even as its influences and metaphors come into clearer focus than ever before. It’s worth noting that Shinkai’s last three films came out in the wake of the earthquake and resulting tsunami that devastated Japan in 2011, and they all touch on it in some way, but this is the first time that event becomes an actual plot point.

The movie doesn’t belabor it, though. You either know the significance of March 11 in Japan or you don’t. Suzume is more concerned with what’s left behind in the wake of a horrific disaster like that—both physically and spiritually—than it is with the disasters themselves (even if the actual text of the plot is sort of about the nature of earthquakes). Suzume is full of ruins … empty villages, dilapidated schools, even strained relationships (if you want to push the metaphor a little), but it never dwells on devastation. Like Weathering With You, it’s about making a choice; not to fall in love this time, but simply to stick around, like a lone door standing in the middle of an abandoned bathhouse.

It‘s also a movie about a girl whose boyfriend is a talking chair with three legs. Shinkai’s movies aren’t generally funny, save for a great body-swap gag in Your Name., but everything he does with the chair—actually a young man named Souta cursed to be a chair—is genius. There are several chase scenes with the chair, where its goofy three-legged walk is more beautifully animated than it has any right to be (the whole movie is beautifully animated, as Shinkai’s works often are), and it also incongruously opens the door for what are some of the most openly horny moments in the director’s canon.

His movies are more about teary-eyed looks of longing than actual physical intimacy, and while there is a cute kiss here (yes, between a girl and a chair), it’s nothing compared to the very flirty grin on Suzume’s face when she chooses to sit on Souta rather than a normal chair. It’s just a shame that the central love story doesn’t land as hard as it does in, say, Your Name., which squeezes so much heartbreaking magic out of even just the reveal of its title line.

Suzume is also Shinkai’s most explicitly Studio Ghibli-esque film, and maybe the most impressive thing about it is that it doesn’t suffer that much in that comparison. Its mythology feels reminiscent of the matter-of-fact presentation of the bathhouse in Spirited Away; its reluctance to color anyone or anything as “evil” (as opposed to “misguided”) is right out of Princess Mononoke; and one character even directly calls out Whisper Of The Heart when they see a talking cat (see also: Kiki’s Delivery Service) riding a train.

Suzume is Shinkai’s biggest and possibly most complex movie, and parts of it feel more personal due to the invocation of real history, but it’s also a bit overly concerned with its plot—to the point where it seems to take its central relationship for granted. Hey, people want to see a girl and a chair fall in love! Just let them!