Don’t open the door!
A girl meets a young man she finds interesting, but since she is so nosy, she ends up opening a door she shouldn’t have opened. She also removes the thing that protects the world from a giant worm that creates earthquakes if it’s let out. And to make matters worse, her new friend is turned into a chair! So she’s trying to close doors that have been opened, catch the cat that was the thing that prevented the worm from entering the human world, and save her chair—sorry, her new friend who is a chair.
“Suzume” is a movie that didn’t hook me straight away. But after 40 minutes, I really enjoyed it where we follow the protagonist on her journey. She is a sad girl since she lost her mother at a young age, and she lives now with her aunt. But she has a dream where she is a young girl and is upset, and there she meets a person who may be her mother.
Then her adventure begins, and at the start, this feels more like a road trip where the girl meets nice people who she likes, and they like her. She is the perfect innocent girl, but at the same time, she isn’t nice towards her aunt who has been taking care of her for 12 years. So that wasn’t something I didn’t like. So I hoped her aunt would find me and give me a hard spanking! Sorry, I meant, I hoped she would give her niece a hard spanking since she’s so ungrateful.
I can understand her frustration, but come on girl! I loved the darker scene when both of them opened up, especially when the aunt ripped her soul apart after she let it all out. That is a brutal scene when you think of how sad and lost her niece is. That was my favorite scene in the movie. It felt real.
The movie is beautiful to look at, and you have that cozy Japanese feeling while watching it. But it never creates the same magic as in the old Studio Ghibli movies. It feels like a Studio Ghibli movie with the cat and the chair characters, but the universe we visit isn’t imaginative enough. It doesn’t give you the feeling of visiting a completely new universe you haven’t visited before.
“Suzume” is an emotional movie, but I never felt the right chemistry between her love interest as I wanted to. In fact, I felt there was a stronger emotional bond between the girl and the cute little cat that I thought was the one person she was longing for. But was I right? Well, as usual, you have to find out yourself.