Suzume (film)

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Suzume (すずめの戸締まり, Suzume no Tojimari, lit. "Suzume's Locking Up") is a 2022 fantasy anime film by Makoto Shinkai, his eighth major production. Its soundtrack sees the return of RADWIMPS, this time in collaboration with Kazuma Jinnouchi, and with TikTok star Toaka doing vocals on the eponymous song. It is animated by CoMix Wave Films and distributed by Toho. In Japan, the film released in November. It is scheduled to release in 2023 in English speaking countries.

12 years ago, then 4-year old Suzume Iwato (Nanoka Hara) lost her mother Tsubame (Kana Hanazawa) in the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.

In present day, Suzume is now a high school student staying with her aunt Tamaki (Eri Fukatsu) in Kyushu, southwest Japan. One morning while cycling to school, she passes a college-age young man looking for ruins, who she later learns is named Sōta Munakata (Hokuto Matsumura). She beats him to an abandoned onsen resort, where she finds a solitary door through which an inaccessible starry sky can be seen. In the process, she dislodges a keystone that turns into a white cat. Later, returning to the resort from school after seeing a wormlike maroon emanation from that direction, she reencounters Sōta and helps him close the door the emanation is coming through. He gets injured in the process, and Suzume takes him home to bandage the wound. However, the cat appears and curses him to be bound into a three-legged chair that Suzume's mother had made for her. Suzume and Sōta now have to pursue the cat, which social media nicknames Daijin (Ann Yamane), across Japan in the hope of subduing it before it opens any more doors to let disaster through again.

Tropes used in Suzume (film) include:

• Animalistic Abomination: Daijin looks like a white cat, but its left eye is clearly unnatural, and that's even before it sounding way too gleeful about the havoc the worm will wreak.
• Book Ends: An early scene has Suzume cycling to school and meeting Sōta going the other way. The last scene does the same.
• Cerebus Retcon: Jokes about chair!Sōta sleeping like a log lose their humour once it's revealed that Daijin binding him to the chair will also lead to him turning into a replacement keystone, a process that is sapping his humanity and vitality.
• Character Title: Guess who the main character is. No seriously. Guess. We will give you three hints: the character's name starts with "S", ends in "E", and shares a name with the title of the 2022 Makoto Shinkai film "Suzume".
• Disappeared Dad:
  • Tsubame was a single mother; whether Suzume's father abandoned them or died or why else he's absent from their lives is never revealed.
  • Rumi is also apparently a single mother to her twins. The father is never shown or discussed.
• Diving Save: Sōta does one to save Suzume from falling debris.
• Eldritch Abomination: The worm first emerges from the doors as a, well, wormlike maroon smoke, but as more of it escapes, it starts to take on forms that wouldn't be out of place in Neon Genesis Evangelion.
• Ghost Town: The Portal Door which Suzume first closes is located here, an abandoned onsen resort.
• The Gump: In an antagonist variant, the worm's escapes are responsible for various historical disasters. The 1923 Great Kantō earthquake is explicitly said to be one of those.
• Invisible to Normals: Suzume quickly learns to her horror that, apart from Sōta and herself, nobody can see the worm.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Suzume removing the keystone is what speeds up the worm's escape.
• Opposite Gender Protagonists: Suzume, a high school girl, and Sōta, a college young man who's part of a lineage of Closers, travel across Japan closing doors before the worm can escape fully and cause disasters.
• Ordinary High School Student: Suzume starts as this, having no idea of the supernatural struggles hidden to Japanese muggle society. Her removing the keystone, unleashing Daijin, and subsequent drive to make amends lead to her helping Sōta to close doors throughout Japan. The film quickly shifts from being a Teen Drama to an action-adventure film.
• Parental Abandonment: Sōta was Raised by Grandparents; what happened to his parents is never revealed.
• Portal Door: The solitary doors in the ruins, which apparently lead to a starry area. It's impossible for her to step through, though. Any attempts to do so only lands her on the other side of the door. They're portals to the Ever-After, where the souls of the dead go and all time is present simultaneously, and the living normally can't go there. A young Suzume somehow fell through one, and the only way to go back is to find the same one again.
• Sailor Fuku: The uniform of Chika's high school, contrasting Suzume's which has a normal collar. Chika notes the difference as one of the signs that Suzume's Not From Around Here.
• Scenery Gorn: The film opens on the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Many scenes take place in abandoned, overgrown, ruined areas. The climax occurs among a landscape of flaming wreckage.
• Scenery Porn: There are lots of shots which focuses on green scenery, or wide shots of the sea.
• Screen Shake: Occurs in the scene when Suzume first helps close a door, used to emphasize the intensity of the actions occurring.
• Shout-Out: When Chika asks Suzume how she caught the runaway oranges, the latter says that "My body moved before I could even think."
• Slice of Life: The main part of the film opens this way, starring the journey of an Ordinary High School Student biking to school. Fantastic sequences of closing the doors are also contrasted with mundane life with the people that Suzume encounters.
• Stable Time Loop: In the climax, after sealing the worm, Suzume sees her younger self in the Ever-After and realises that the dream she had of her mother finding her younger self while carrying the chair? That was she herself all along.