Makoto Shinkai’s latest anime film ‘Suzume’ reflects on perpetual danger and finding joy in a world of uncertainty

Makoto Shinkai, the director and animator of some of the most popular anime features in the world, has become one of cinema’s most imaginative filmmakers of contemporary cataclysm. His movies are not just about surviving apocalypse but living with its omnipresent threat. His latest film, “Suzume,” is the third blockbuster that he has created following the 2011 earthquake in Japan, which he has been able to link to ecological disaster.

Shinkai, who is now 50 years old, was never the same filmmaker after the earthquake struck Japan. The tsunami and quake ravaged the Tōhoku region of northern Japan and prompted a nuclear meltdown. Shinkai could feel his sense of storytelling crumbling. He said that “the shock to me was that the daily life that we had become accustomed to in Japan can suddenly be severed without any warning whatsoever. I had this odd, foreboding feeling that that could happen again and again. I began to think about how I wanted to tell stories within this new reality.”

His first film, “Your Name,” featured a meteor that threatened to demolish a village, an event that dovetailed with a body-switching romance. In “Weathering With You,” a runaway teenage boy befriends a Tokyo girl who can control the weather, spawning fluctuations that mirror climate change. “Suzume” returns to the earthquake of 2011, where Suzume, whose mother perished in the tsunami, meets a mysterious young man responsible for racing to close portals before they unleash a giant, earthquake-causing worm.

Shinkai’s disasters take on metaphorical meaning for young protagonists who learn to persist and find joy in a world of perpetual danger, shadowed by loss. He believes that young people shouldn’t be pandered to with stories where the natural world is heroically returned to balance, calling such approaches “egotistic and irresponsible.”

Shinkai has emerged as one of the biggest box-office draws in movies, with “Your Name” becoming the then-best-selling anime of all time, dethroning Hayao Miyazaki’s beloved “Spirited Away” with nearly $400 million in ticket sales. “Weathering With You” made nearly $200 million. Before opening in North America, “Suzume” had already crossed $200 million, including $100 million in Japan and nearly that in China. It’s easily the biggest international release of the year so far in China, more than doubling the sales of “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.”

Shinkai has become convinced that young people should be challenged to set aside the idea that daily life will continue to maintain the status quo. Extreme geological events like earthquakes, climate change, the pandemic, Russia and Ukraine have made this imperative.

In an interview with the LA Times, Shinkai said, “It can be anything: earthquakes, climate change, the pandemic. Russia and Ukraine, for example. This idea that our daily life will continue to maintain the status quo should be set aside and challenged.”

Shinkai has often been cited as one of the heirs to Miyazaki. However, he says that his latest film is no homage to Miyazaki, even though Miyazaki’s influence is so pervasive in Japanese society that it seeps into everything. Shinkai imagines Suzume, herself, grew up on Miyazaki’s films.

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In his films, Shinkai often uses photorealistic panoramas of glittering splendor. In “Suzume,” however, the most indelible image is the one he uses at the beginning and end of the film.