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This is now the third film in a row from Japanese animation director Makoto Shinkai to feature a young couple caught up in an adventure that strongly features mysticism, spiritualism and natural disaster. 2016’s Your Name was a teen body swap/time travel story built around an asteroid strike, Weathering With You, released three years later, centred around a girl who could control the weather which inadvertently lead to cities flooding and Suzume tells the story of a young woman who lost her mother in the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami and has to battle inter dimensional spirits to prevent more damaging tremors. This last film is the only one built around a real catastrophe but believable environmental concerns are a strong theme throughout this informal trilogy. They also all involve travel between various Japanese locals and Tokyo is a big part of each.

This does mean that the movies are getting a little samey now, and certainly some have criticised Shinkai for this but frankly when the imaginative story telling and artistry are this rich, as far as I am concerned he can keep doing it forever. I adored Your Name and Weathering With You and this is another brilliant and beautiful film. I may not love this one quite as much as the others but it is still leagues ahead of everything else. I saw The Super Mario Bros. Movie last week and the fact that these two films would be grouped together if nominated for awards or placed in a convenient categorisation for any other reason is laughable, they are as incomparable as Beethoven and Baby Shark. This is animation as it can be done and it is spectacular, again.

There are differences to Shinkai’s previous movies in this too, largely in the influence of other works. There is a clear and deliberate debt to Studio Ghibli in Suzume, with its huge formless monsters, inanimate objects coming to life and plots with a reliance on smart arse cats. The director actually confirms this inspiration by referencing one Ghibli film by name on screen, which along with the inclusion of real events actually grounds this in our reality rather than the shared universe of his last two movies. He has also cited Kiki’s Delivery Service as an something he was riffing on in interviews which is not the one I’d have thought he’d mentioned (apart maybe, in relation to the cat) but there it is. It is bold as a Japanese animator to deliberately draw comparisons to Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki but he’s more than earned it.

It is possible that Suzume doesn’t have quite the same emotional power as Your Name and Weathering With You either, but whereas this came from the love and yearning of its young characters in the past here the focus is more on familial relationships and parental figures. That’s where the gut punches are this time, not in some sudden Romeo and Juliet dynamic.

Steering away from all of this and judging it on its own merits though, Suzume is a wonderful, fantastic, witty, fantastical and moving quest movie. It you’ve not seen any Shinkai before then this is a perfect place to start and go into it knowing that you are opening a door you’ll not want to close.

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The Ripley Factor:

As well as having a strong female protagonist, stronger than we have seen from Shinkai before and that is saying something, the movie also has some really nice depictions of female friendships. It starts with the lead character’s closest schoolmate, as these stories often do, but goes beyond that to look at how women connect with one another in a range of different situations. After all those recent second person personal pronouns, this is actually the first of Shinkai’s seven features as director to feature a female name in the title (or any name for that matter – it is called Suzume’s Looking Up in its home country) and it is a good one for this to be the case. It definitely tells a woman’s story in a way even he hasn’t done before.

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