Apr 16, 2023
I feel kind of insane looking at the overwhelming positive reaction Suzume has gotten in both film and anime circles. I understand why people liked it: it's beautifully presented and the way it's directed seems scientifically manufactured to cause an emotional reaction. However, the actual content of the story is a complete mess.
It's a movie that tries to use Japanese folklore to deliver a fantastical and wonderous look at earthquakes, but it's not really explored or explained aside from 4 basic ideas: a big bad worm in the land of the dead is responsible for all the earthquakes of japan, and to prevent them from
...
happening professional sealers have to shut down doors from where the worm creeps into the land of the living. Also, there are some important stones that prevent the worm from escaping, but they are actually cat-gods. Ok.
It's a movie that tries to be a character-driven road trip, but every person here is the most vanilla default NPC character, and every glimpse we get of their core struggles is very abrupt and inconsequential to what's happening. There are some slice-of-life comedic moments here and there to add a bit of a human touch, but it just doesn't connect or amount to much and it doesn't make me feel like I know these characters more than when they were first presented. In fact, because the protagonist magically finds the most wholesome and altruistic people in all of Japan just by pure luck and she's rarely ever alone and always has food and bed, there isn't much in terms of silent moments of her reflecting on what's happening and what's her paper in all of this, so it all feels like it's going through the motions just because.
It's a movie that tries to give us a romance-fueled quest to bring back the protagonist's hot crush and free him from his chair form, but... there is absolutely no chemistry between these two. Despite that, the protagonist straight up endangers the life of millions because she can't live with the fact that a person she's known for 3 days has sacrificed to prevent a near world-ending catastrophe. Also, when it all ends, the boy just straight up leaves and doesn't reciprocate the girl's feelings. He does come back to meet the protagonist in the post-credits scene but... I don't know what they were going with this, it felt like trying to replicate the whole "bittersweet ending" of Your Name but failing in the most comically deflating way possible.
And finally it's a movie about TRAUMA. Big huge trauma... that's not really explored at all, and when it does, it's in the final moments of the movie to tie this mess of a plot with the 2011 tsunami. Very cheap, completely unearned, and it comes off as very insincere and manufactured. And it's not like you can't tie your movie events with something that happened in real life in the climax moments of your movie: In This Corner of the World played a similar card, but it explored all the aftermath, all the psychological consequences, you get to see how it affects the character... But Suzume doesn't even scratch the surface of that because it's too distracted with its weak fantastical elements, its weak road trip movie shenanigans and its weak romance plot. So when the time comes to play the 2011 tsunami card, it's way late in the movie to be of any kind of significance, but it does it anyway because it's an easy way to generate an emotional response from the audience. Might as well put a sign that says "you're supposed to cry now".
It's such a disjointed movie, it's so weak, it's so dumb in the way it mixes all of its ideas together, and it even has the nerve to put a time loop subplot in the final freaking minutes of the movie because "it worked so well in Your Name, might as well do it again" but it doesn't amount to anything. I haven't seen a production of this caliber waste so much money and talent on a plot so amateurish in a long time.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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