From the director of Your Name, the only body-swap romance film I can think of that’s actually worth watching, the latest from animator Makoto Shinkai makes that film’s high concept look downright pedestrian. I mean, most films look normal compared to the story of a Japanese schoolgirl who falls in love with a chair cursed by a cat-god, but my point still stands.
Setting up its internal mythology quite well in its pre-title scene involving a magic door and Suzume (Nanoka Hara) and Souta (Hokuto Matsumura)’s attempts to close it before a giant purple death-worm slithers out of it…
Okay, before we get any further, I gotta mention how much I miss films like this. The ones where the story specifics are just that nutty that the simple act of saying what actually happens on-screen is bloody ridiculous. Recounting stuff like this gives me life.
Anyway, back to the story: After Souta is cursed and possesses a chair that Suzume’s mother made for her, the two go on a cross-country trip to a) track down the cat-god Daijin to turn Souta back and b) find and lock all the other magic doors they find. It’s a bit like Kingdom Hearts, only Donald and Goofy are replaced by, and I cannot stress this enough, a chair.
Both the voice acting and the animation from CoMix Wave are pitch-perfect for the story at hand, as the landscapes and background detailing are simply gorgeous throughout. Much like Makoto-san’s past work, this is about the strained relationship between people and nature (part of the reason why he’s regularly compared to fellow anime-druid Hayao Miyazaki), and whether it’s the densely-populated cities, the lush and open fields, or the abandoned and desolate places that the doors turn up in, it all works at establishing and even strengthening that relationship in places.
The way the specifics of the plot are visualised as well was just great to see on the big screen. Daijin is at once absolutely adorable and a complete arsehole, deciding on a whim that, y’know what, I’m not going to guard the world of the living from death-worms anymore. It’s your job now, and you’re also a chair; have fun. It’s a general attitude and demeanour that should be familiar to anyone who has a cat (or, more accurately, is a slave to their cat). There’s something about the way Souta as a chair is animated as well, showing him actively sprinting on his three legs and leaping through the air as he and Suzume race to stop the worms from entering.
I should mention at this point that this is a film made for all ages, so despite this involving a relationship with a chair, there’s a surprising lack of jokes about face-sitting in here. Although, given Suzume unironically asks Souta if she can step on him at one point, odds are that Makoto-san was at least partially aware of the story optics.
Of course, much like with Your Name, the giddy feeling that comes from this animated road trip doesn’t stay so pure and innocent for long. The further along it goes, the more it becomes clear that the story may be dressed up in shonen-esque ‘save the world from demons’ aesthetics, but what’s actually being highlighted is a lot more real than that. The reason why Suzume still has that chair in the first place is because it is the only thing she has left to remember her mother by… after she lost her life in the 2011 earthquake. She and Souta are the only ones who can even see the worms as they enter the living world; as far as everyone else is concerned, it’s just another earthquake.
Yeah. This gets into some heavy shit. It’s basically a showing of solidarity with everyone who lost loved ones in the disaster, or indeed any natural disaster before or since, and acknowledging that while we do need to mourn, we also need to reconnect with life afterwards. Seeing the abandoned and run-down houses and schools and amusement parks that the magic doors spawn in, they all look like architectural scars against the rest of the landscape. Physical reminders of disaster, of neglect, of things that we can’t restore or properly bury. Memories made tangible, and ones that carry a lot of pain to this day.
While part of me misses Your Name’s ticking-clock tension during its final reel, the extent to which this film similarly got me pouring out tears like a faucet made me love it just as much. It starts out as a madcap road trip across Japan, where the oddity of the walking and talking chair is allowed to occupy space as an oddity rather than being dissected and scrutinised in a way that just rips the whimsy right out of it. But once it has the audience nice and settled in, it applies the emotional screws and sets the stage for its home country to resolve a national trauma.
In its intent, it reminded me a bit of Satoshi Kon’s Paranoia Agent, which also set out to make Japanese audiences come to grips with their past. But where Satoshi was full of righteous anger and indignation, Makoto wants the audience to remember the lives that were, not just that they were lost, and find a way to honour those lives by making the most of the ones they still have. Like with Daniels, he used a patently absurd premise to speak real and quite devastating emotional truths.
It's… been a while since a film got me crying in the cinema like this. I’ve missed that too.
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