I’m not the biggest fan of Makoto Shinkai but I’m aware of how popular he is and I know that at least it will be a visual feast. Indeed, if nothing else this is an audiovisual delight, with intricately detailed scenes and enjoyable music that calls back past eras. Initially the story seems promising as well but it all falls apart very quickly as the supernatural world it introduces follows no consistent rules and its themes are a mess. Shinkai knows how to evoke strong emotions but these feelings are unearned as they are achieved through a series of misleading tricks. It’s spectacular and fit for the big screen but ultimately superficial.

Suzume Iwato is a high school girl who is being raised by her aunt in a small town, having lost her mother at a young age. One day while on the way to school, she encounters a young man named Souta who asks her about any ruins nearby. After telling him about an abandoned onsen in the area, she impulsively heads there herself and finds a lone door standing in its frame amidst the ruins. She opens the door to a starlit field inside but is unable to cross into it. She also trips over the statue of a cat and pulls at it, whereupon it turns into a real cat. Later she witnesses a huge column of smoke over the town emerging from the open door yet no one else can see it. Returning to the area, she finds Souta struggling to close the door. He explains that he is Closer, tasked with finding and closing such doors to prevent the smoke-like worm from emerging and causing earthquakes throughout Japan. Suzume helps him and they succeed but he is injured in the process. They return to her house and are followed by the cat which is able to talk and is called Daijin. The cat seemingly traps Souta in the form of an animated three-legged stool that is Suzume’s treasured childhood possession, then flees. Suzume and Souta are then forced to chase the cat all over Japan, encountering more of the mysterious doors in the process.

The premise certainly seems intriguing: that all earthquakes in Japan are actually caused by monsters, that there is a secret society of Closers tasked with dealing with the threat, that these monsters emerge from doors into the Endless Night and so on. Unfortunately, put it all together and it soon becomes obvious that there’s no coherence and no effort put into the worldbuilding. The rules governing the interactions aren’t consistent and there’s no real theme. We can infer that Shinkai was driven mostly by pure imagery and raw feelings and so threw whatever he liked together without further thought. So a door standing in its frame, already a familiar trope in other works, looks striking as does the concept of a gigantic shadowy worm being the true of earthquakes. Yet there’s no real connection between the two. I find it somewhat fascinating as yet another example of how Japanese fiction prefers to use impersonal disasters or larger-than-life threats as antagonists in their stories and I do like that the director was inspired by the abandoned towns and buildings in Japan as the country depopulates. It’s just that he doesn’t do anything very interesting with these ideas.

It’s admittedly a very beautiful film and the musical choices are effective as well, with so-called oldies music being used for their road trip. Though the film does a poor job of integrating that theme, I do like that at times it feels something like a running away from home movie as Suzume travels farther and farther away in her quest to help Souta. At every stop, she receives help and shelter from kindly people, so it’s not like she experiences a lot of hardship. The constant movement and travel are a good fit for the kinetic cinematography even if Suzume’s adventures are too rose-tinted for me.

Like the director’s other films, this one is all about intense feelings and vivid imagery without anything substantial behind them. Here, he also throws in an assortment of unrelated ideas which are superficially interesting but just don’t contribute to the overall story. For example, why not explicitly point out that the worm creature is being strengthened by the increasing number of places being abandoned in Japan? Probably because he had no good way of spinning this in a positive way. Similarly the unnecessary romance between Suzume and Souta seems to have been included just to fulfill the expectations of fans. I suppose this is all that is needed to please the teenagers and younger crowd who are his fans but it’s not enough for me.