Suzume on France 4: total splendor by the director of Your Name (review)

After the disappointing Children of Time, Makoto Shinkai returns in great form with this magical, ultra-entertaining teenage road trip that is absolutely obvious.

If you haven’t seen Suzume, a gem of Japanese animation released in cinemas in 2023, a mandatory catch-up session this Saturday, October 24 on France 4, for its first free-to-air broadcast on French television. The film will then be available from Sunday and for 30 days in streaming on the France Télévisions website.

According to the Shinto religion, the land of Japan is above all that of kami: deities who inhabit every corner of the country – streams and rocks, rivers and mountains. And the supernatural strength of each of these kamis is sometimes nigimitama (benevolent force), sometimes aramitama (brutal force). Construction and destruction: it is this dynamic that propels Suzumethe heroine of the film, on the trail of a mischievous kami, taking the form of a cat who sets out to open a series of doors scattered throughout Japan; doors that will open the way to a series of gigantic disasters… doors that are all located in abandoned places, ruins where one must listen to the ghosts of the past to be able to perform the ritual closing the doors of destruction. All in all, what great ideas.

Suzume is above all a fabulous teenage road trip, punctuated by earthquake alerts appearing on smartphones, where the heroine crosses the country from west to east, from door to door, helped by a series of chance encounters; a lesson in narration as much as a lesson in visual technique, in short a real lesson in cinema since the mechanism of the film does not bind it: on the contrary it is a question of surfing on it. Shinkai has fun with the codes of Japanese entertainment: Sôta, the handsome guy with the supernatural power to close doors, is transformed into a three-legged chair by the kami-cat, which gives one of the most beautiful characters in animated cinema ever seen. This apparent distance, a bit ironic, with its form perhaps explains why Suzume was not the absolute winner of the 2022 cinema year in Japan: although very lucrative in theaters, it was beaten at the box office by two animes from very popular franchises, Jujutsu Kaizen 0 and One Piece Film: Red. And by Top Gun: Maverick, too.

Every twenty years, the two largest Shinto shrines in Japan, located in the city of Ise, are deliberately destroyed to be rebuilt (for more than 1500 years, according to tradition). In the same way, Suzume defuses the fear of destruction, which is no longer seen as a punishment (at the time for analyzes seeing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki the inevitable source of the Japanese obsession with the great badaboums) but as a necessary part of the great dynamic of life. Just that? “This cycle is inherent to Japanese society,” Shinkai explained to us in an interview. “Because of earthquakes, inevitably, most cities are always destroyed at some point. Tokyo was devastated a hundred years ago, Kobe in 1995… We always repeat the same thing: destroy and rebuild. »

“WITH SUZUME, I WANTED TO MAKE AN ADVENTURE FILM”

Suzume is riding full steam on this dynamic that was missing in Les Enfants du temps (2019), which had the heavy task of being the film after Your Name and which ran a little too much in search of the same pop obviousness, the same narrative and visual clarity. The astonishing triumph of 2016 which made its director a true filmmaker no longer limits him. Suzume is no more a self-remake of Your Name than it is an obsessive repetition of Shinkai’s themes. Suzume is absolutely obvious, and tells something very complicated in the simplest way possible. Ultimately, Suzume is self-sufficient and does not need our long, convoluted comments: the film simply affirms that the creative force is as much about creation as it is about destruction. As much nigimitama as aramitama.

By Makoto Shinkai. With the voices of Nanoka Hara, Hokuto Matsumura, Eri Fukatsu… Duration 2h02.