Time: 122 Minutes
Age Rating: PG – Coarse language
Cast:
Nanoka Hara as Suzume Iwato
Hokuto Matsumura as Souta Munakata
Eri Fukatsu as Tamaki Iwato
Shota Sometani as Minoru Okabe
Amanda C. Miller as Rumi Ninomiya
Kotone Hanase as Chika Amabe
Kana Hanazawa as Tsubame Iwato
Matsumoto Hakuō II as Hitsujirō Munakata
Director: Makato Shinkai

I watched Suzume, because I was hearing good things about it. I went into it not knowing anything about it besides the fact that it’s an anime film. Within the first minute of watching, I quickly realised it was a film from Makoto Shinkai, the director of Your Name, and became really excited. It definitely lived up to its potential. 

In the first act, the movie quickly takes you on a fun, heartfelt and creative adventure with a lot of humour. Its very fun to watch throughout, helped by the great chemistry between the main characters. It handles worldbuilding well, especially considering that it has to establish a lot of fantasy elements while not feeling that its dumping too much exposition on you. As expected with the director’s other work, it does well at mixing fantastical elements with the topics and themes like grief and loss. Despite much of the quirkiness, it is a tragic story about family, loss, trauma, and lasting heartbreak. It is effectively emotional and genuinely affecting, and it lands the emotional punches in the third act as intended. Suzume admittedly feels its length a little especially towards the end, but otherwise the movie moves at a good pace.

Once again this is from Makoto Shinkai, the director of Your Name and Weathering with You and his style from those movies are on display here. It’s visually gorgeous, and colourful, but also makes enough choices to make Suzume stylistically unique in its own right. It’s also accompanied by a beautiful and haunting soundtrack.

Suzume is an entertaining, emotional and enthralling fantasy adventure with beautiful animation. It is well worth checking out, especially if you liked Your Name.