Suzume

Makoto Shinkai’s film closes his disaster trilogy. Shinkai says the 2011 earthquake sits at its core, and that the walking chair and the talking cat came from what the story demanded, not as a bow to Ghibli. The chair was not the starting idea. Shinkai first pictured another girl as Suzume’s companion; when his producer said the audience still wanted romance, he made her main attachment a chair, so the film would not tip into a love story. Nor is the chair random: her mother built it as a birthday present. Nanoka Hara, who voices Suzume, was picked from more than 1,700 applicants in her first anime voice role. It opened in Japan in November 2022, then premiered internationally in competition at the 73rd Berlin festival, the first anime feature there since Spirited Away in 2002. The awards split: a Golden Globe nomination for animated feature; at the Japan Academy Film Prize a loss for animation of the year but a win for the music of Radwimps and Kazuma Jinnouchi. A good fit if you can read the route, a closed hot spring, a school, a ferris wheel and finally a town erased in 2011, as mourning rather than adventure. Not for viewers who lived through that earthquake and tsunami; the film goes straight there at the end.