Animated cinema is the protagonist of the weekend in theaters with “Suzume”, the new film by Makoto Shinkai, one of the most popular contemporary anime directors.
The title refers to the name of the protagonist, a 17-year-old girl who lives in a quiet town in Kyushu. One day she meets a young traveler who is looking for a mysterious “door” and she decides to follow him.
It will be Suzume who discovers the existence of an old portal in the ruins of the mountains. In fact, legend tells of the existence of several connected gates throughout Japan and that the closure of one of them is the cause of terrible disasters.
After the successes of “Your Name” (2016) and “Weathering With You” (2019), the name of Makoto Shinkai has become a celebrity for fans of the genre and his success has continued at home with this new feature film, presented in competition at the last Berlin Film Festival. The director’s touch is fully recognizable and various themes of his previous films can be found (from the relationship between human beings and the environment, through profound reflections on adolescence and the search for one’s own place in the world), but in this case the bar is raised even further from an aesthetic point of view, so as to make this film a real audiovisual show.
Fukushima, references to the 2011 tragedy
If the graphic choices are enormously fascinating, the script – as often happens in the author’s cinema – becomes too cumbersome as the minutes go by, even though the interest in a script that is nonetheless capable of involving never diminishes. Some excesses on the narrative side is compensated with a series of sequences with a very high emotional rate, which show how the journey made by Suzume is above all a path that the girl takes within herself until she tries to understand her mother’s death when she was little girl. The individual trauma of the protagonist soon becomes a collective metaphor for an entire nation, not only because the opening of the mysterious doors causes some earthquakes, but because there is also a reference to March 11, the day in 2011 the terrible earthquake and subsequent tsunami that caused the disaster of the Fukushima nuclear power plant occurred.
Also for this reason it is a film to be seen and to reflect on for a long time after the vision.
“Suzume” and the other films of the week
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Dog that barks doesn’t bite
We remain in the Far East to celebrate the release in Italy of “Dog that barks doesn’t bite”, the debut film by Bong Joon-ho, which comes out in our country no less than twenty-three years after its first presentations. The protagonist is a man who aspires to the role of professor, but fails to achieve his goal. Increasingly desperate for the professional situation in which he finds himself, he will begin to pour out his frustrations on the neighborhood dogs. It is a black comedy that already shows the talent of the future director of masterpieces such as “Mother” or “Parasite”: “Dog barking doesn’t bite” has undoubtedly immature passages and the staging is not perfect, but the overall design is incisive to the right point, thanks to the excellent writing of the characters and the good overall editing times. The result is in fact an unconventional work and layered, certainly among the most interesting Korean debuts of the last few decades. Anyone who has never seen it must run to the cinema!