Suzume lives with her aunt in a small town in Kyushu. On the way to school she meets a young man looking for a door in a ruin. She follows him and finds a door standing alone in a flooded hot-spring resort, with the sky of another place behind it. She opens it. A red worm the size of a city pours out and only she can see it. Suzume is Makoto Shinkai’s film about the 2011 earthquake, and the final door is in Tohoku.
What Happens With Souta And The Chair
Souta is a Closer, whose family has shut doors for generations. A cat called Daijin, a keystone that held the worm down, turns Souta into Suzume’s childhood chair, which has three legs. Suzume and the chair hitchhike, ferry and drive across Japan, Ehime, Kobe and Tokyo, closing doors as the worm rises, while Daijin leads them on. Under Tokyo, Souta becomes the new keystone. Suzume decides she is not having that, and the last act is her aunt, a borrowed car and the house she was born in.
Why It Is Shinkai’s Most Direct Film
The doors are in places that were abandoned: a resort, a school, an amusement park, and finally a town the tsunami took. The voices of the dead at each door are the people who lived there. It made 320 million dollars worldwide, the third Shinkai film to do so. The chair became a toy. Radwimps did the music again with Kazuma Jinnouchi.
Watch Suzume On GoMovies
122 minutes in HD, Japanese with subtitles. Press play above. Free, no sign-up.
