Revealing the Secrets of Several Major Imageries in 'Suzume'

At the other end of the door, there is all the time. Shinkai Makoto trilogy, Your Name, Weathering with You, Suzume, finally ended with Suzume.

The story depicts Suzume's encounter with Sōta, who embarks on a road trip with the task of "closing the door" in ruins all over Japan. This time, Shinkai Makoto adds newer fantasy elements to his creation, such as the anthropomorphic cat and chair.

I've always felt Japan is one of the best countries for road movies, with its winding coastlines, interlaced paths in the mountains, and beautiful villages. Anyone who enters such a space will go deep, like being in a fairyland, and be fascinated.

But just like this, when Shinkai Makoto embeds the relaxed journey into various ruins and earthquakes in Japan, it creates a great sense of tension and contrast. And the personal memories and pains flooded in the vastness of history suddenly spill out, just like opening a dust-laden door of memory.

Cats: You can never control them

During the creation of Suzume, Shinkai Makoto raised two cats, one of which has the same name as Suzume. In the film, you will constantly hear Suzume's name called, creating a unique sense of impact, also reflected in his first two works.

Before making the film, Shinkai Makoto visited many green areas in Japan and found most of the places that used to be full of vitality had become declining, coupled with the reflections of the Tōhoku earthquake in 2011 and COVID-19. Shinkai Makoto deeply felt the beauty and cruelty of nature.

Through raising cats, he felt that cats are like nature, full of variables and uncontrollable factors, so he designed the role of Daijin, which integrated the confrontation between cats and humans into the film, symbolizing the relationship between humans and nature.

When Daijin finally turns back into the keystone, it says to Suzume, "If I can't be Suzume's cat, use your hands to restore everything." Faced with the finiteness of life and the infinity of nature, we have to say goodbye to the people and things we love, but we still have to embrace hope and face tomorrow.

Doors: From Body to Memory

The film uses the image of doors as a clue to connect the whole journey. Through constantly searching for and closing doors, Suzume completes her self-healing of psychological trauma. And she reawakens, reviews, faces, and comforts the souls who died in the earthquakes in Japanese history and people facing the trauma of those disasters.

Most of Shinkai Makoto's works have a powerful personal imprint and emotional characteristics. They often revolve around the love of young boys and girls. In romantic and fatalistic portrayal, he settles the images in an extreme and intense mood. As the final chapter of the "Disaster Trilogy," this film breaks away from one-sided personal emotions and generalizes them into a connection with society, nation, and history.

Where Suzume has traveled through are the epicenters of some of the worst earthquakes in Japan's history, and the pain and fear lurk in people's subconscious.

The door she unintentionally opens releases both the geographical disaster brought about by the "worm" and the memories of the victims buried by fear and pain. People try to dilute and forget but cannot forget that trauma. But blindly suppressing and escaping will only bring about greater counterattacks and outbreaks.

So, Suzume opens the door with curiosity and confusion, turning the hidden danger into an opportunity to survive and symbolizing her initiative to knock on the door of collective trauma. At first, she uses her body to try repeatedly to cross the boundary between reality and death but fails.

After that, as a secret intruder, through experience and travel, she feels local people's life concretely, integrates her body and life into different situations and customs, and finally uses her body as a bridge of energy to stimulate and connect the collective trauma of disaster accumulated in the deep memory.

At the same time, these collective feelings heal her trauma, and during this journey, she gradually recalls everything that happened in the past. This door to the past and death makes individuals and the collective support each other during facing trauma, forming a community woven by physical experience and memory, and achieving mutual healing.

Shoes: Carrying double the courage

In Shinkai Makoto's works, there is an impressive film about the love affair between a 15-year-old student and a 27-year-old woman, The Garden of Words. The male and female protagonists use shoes as a bond. The male protagonist tries to make the female protagonist a pair of suitable shoes. He hopes them to be her strength to walk.

And in Suzume, the shoe images also appear unceasingly. Suzume without shoes attracts a lot of attention in the mall. In the end, Suzume, grieving for the loss of Sōta, wears socks covered with dirt and blood, scarred and no longer complete.

She lost her mother when she was a child and now loses Sōta. She has a deep sense of despair. The only difference is that she has enough courage to save him. When she returns to the apartment in Tokyo, she washes away the mess, changes into the school uniform worn when she first met Sōta, and puts on Sōta's shoes. At this time, this pair of shoes not only represents the strength to walk but seems to be accompanied by Sōta, with double the courage to restart. This time, Suzume not only runs to save the world but hopes to save the people she loves.

Yokai: Traditional Imagery of Japanese Animation

Yokai is a usual artistic image in the history of Japanese animation. In Japanese culture, people regard yokai as a sign of natural disasters and believe dead spirits to be associated with the gods' self-indulgence. However, Japanese culture has a unique attitude toward yokai. And even after its development and evolution, it is regarded as an equal part of humans or even embodiments of gods higher than humans.

In modern animation works, such as Summer Days with Coo, Natsume's Book of Friends, and Okko's Inn, yokai are regarded as embodiments of marginal groups with self-defect and healing power. Since Miyazaki Hayao's Spirited Away brought Japanese yokai culture to the world, there have been endless film and television works about this culture and image.

Shinkai Makoto's previous works often have supernatural elements, and the themes often revolve around parallel time and space, time travel, and so on. But the fantasy plot is always confined to people. But a brand-new character is introduced into Suzume as the western keystone, the cat "Daijin."

There is an obscure reference to the origin of Daijin in the plot. After being cursed by Daijin, Sōta also becomes the keystone who suppresses the worm, implying that they may have evolved from humans. By voluntary sacrifice, they transform their souls into patron saints and their external image into yokai. And even objects become soulful living beings. For example, Sōta is cursed and possessed in a chair.

Ruins: The Decadent World of Yesterday

As a symbol of the beauty lost in the past, the ruins are naturally connected to history and even become a medium connecting the real world with the past. Above the ruins is the contemporary world, and below is the decadent world of yesterday. Here, the cycle of time opens the incision with the help of this spatial field, the door of history and reality forms a gap. And in a moment of fixed memory, it presents the past to us.

The film sets plenty of scenes in ruins. Every time Sōta recites the spell, everything dust-laden begins to reappear, rewinding the image to the past and expressing the experience of people in the past very well.

Postscript

But in this film, I think that the plot of Daijin is not perfect enough. The emotional motivation of Suzume and Sōta, though handled mysteriously, is still a little empty. Although Daijin made the audience cry, its tragic ending is slightly flat and shallow. Although it's a pity, it's still a work worth watching by Shinkai Makoto!