Suzume (2022) Review: Shinkai's Road-Trip Epic About Closing Doors

🚪 Introduction

🌠 This review is part of our Makoto Shinkai Movies Ranked guide – see how Your Name, Weathering With You, and Suzume stack up and where to start.

I watched Suzume (2022) again at the weekend, and it confirmed what the first viewing suggested: this is Makoto Shinkai’s most complete film since Your Name — and in a couple of dimensions, his best work, period. It grossed around 314 million dollars worldwide, and it became the first anime film in 21 years — since Spirited Away — to compete at the Berlin International Film Festival. When the Berlinale puts an anime about a talking chair in competition, something interesting is going on.

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Suzume – Steelbook (4K Ultra HD) (opens in a new tab)

Shinkai's ruin-and-sky compositions in full bitrate — the steelbook is the shelf-worthy edition.

The elevator pitch sounds like a fever dream: a seventeen-year-old girl travels across Japan closing magical doors that spill disaster into the world, accompanied by her love interest — who has been transformed into a three-legged children’s chair — while chasing a white cat that talks in viral social-media clips. That this premise resolves into Shinkai’s most emotionally mature film is the magic trick. A 9/10, and it wears the score lightly.

The Premise: Doors, a Cat, and a Three-Legged Chair

Suzume Iwato lives with her aunt in a quiet town in Kyushu. On her way to school she crosses paths with Souta, a striking young man searching for ruins — abandoned places where, he says, doors can be found. She follows, finds a lone freestanding door in a flooded resort ruin, and opens it. Behind it: a star-swept meadow she can see but not enter. What she lets out instead is a “worm” — a vast crimson force that pours from the door, invisible to almost everyone, and causes earthquakes when it falls.

Souta, it turns out, is a “Closer” — the last of a line whose family duty is shutting these doors before disaster spills through. Within twenty minutes a mischievous white cat named Daijin has stolen the keystone that pins the worm down, cursed Souta into the form of a small wooden chair, and skipped town — and Suzume and her chair are chasing it up the length of Japan. Kyushu to Shikoku to Kobe to Tokyo, hitchhiking, ferry-hopping, and going modestly viral (the cat has fans).

Two things elevate this above quest-plot mechanics. First, it’s genuinely funny — the physical comedy of a three-legged chair sprinting through a train station is the hardest I’ve laughed at any Shinkai film, and Daijin is an all-time troll of a mascot. Second, the road trip is secretly the point: every stop pairs Suzume with a different stranger — a citrus-farming girl on Shikoku, a single mom running a bar in Kobe — and each episode quietly builds the film’s real theme: the kindness of strangers as infrastructure, the way a country holds itself together through ordinary people who take in a tired kid for a night.

The Real Subject: A Film About 3/11

Here’s what a plot summary can’t convey, and where the film earns its Berlinale slot: Suzume is, underneath the fantasy, a film about the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami — made for the generation of kids who were too young to fully remember it. The doors appear in abandoned places: a shuttered school, a ruined resort town, an overgrown amusement park. Closing them requires listening for the voices of the people who once lived there. The film’s disaster-alarm sound is Japan’s real one, and Japanese audiences reportedly flinched — that choice was deliberate.

Shinkai has circled disaster before — the comet in Your Name, the drowned city in Weathering With You — but Suzume walks directly at it, and does so with a care that never curdles into misery. As a dad, the final act — which I won’t spoil beyond saying it involves a door Suzume has been avoiding her whole life — is one of the most honest depictions of childhood grief I’ve seen in animation. The film argues that you don’t close the door on loss; you close it properly, with gratitude, which is a different thing entirely. Heavy? Briefly. Earned? Completely. My advice: watch it with your kids, not just near them.

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Suzume (Blu-ray & DVD) (opens in a new tab)

The standard combo edition — this film's landscapes deserve physical media.

The Craft: Ruins, Skies, and a Score With Muscle

Visually, this is the Shinkai you come for — that perfect graphic style all three of these films share — pointed at new subjects. Where Your Name painted cities and Weathering With You painted rain, Suzume paints ruins: rusted ferris wheels against dusk, classrooms with grass growing through the floor, the strange beauty of places people loved and left. The Ever-After behind the doors — a meadow under a sky crowded with stars — is among the most gorgeous single environments in modern animation, and the worm sequences give the film a scale of threat neither predecessor attempted.

The score levels up to match. RADWIMPS return for their third Shinkai film, this time joined by Kazuma Jinnouchi — the composer behind Halo 5’s soundtrack — and his orchestral weight shows in the set pieces. It’s the most cinematic score of the three: fewer pop showstoppers than Your Name, more genuine action and awe. The main theme has squatted in my head since the weekend, and the soundtrack album is doing office duty as I write this.

Family Watch Notes — Heavier Cargo, Gentler Delivery

Our call: 10 and up, with a co-viewer for sensitive kids. There’s nothing graphic and the comedy keeps the ride buoyant — the chair alone will win over any 10-year-old — but the film engages real disaster imagery (evacuated towns, that alarm sound) and the final act deals openly with the death of a parent. It handles all of it with more care than most “family” films handle a scraped knee, but know your kid.

The reward for going there: this is the rare adventure film that gives a family something to actually talk about afterwards — resilience, what it means to rebuild, why grown-ups get quiet about certain memories. And unlike Weathering With You’s morally spiky ending, Suzume resolves into something warm enough that everyone sleeps fine.

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Suzume (Novel) by Makoto Shinkai (opens in a new tab)

Shinkai's own novelization, told from Suzume's perspective — it deepens the backstory the film keeps in reserve.

Where It Stumbles

The gap to a 10 is narrow but real:

• The mythology is rules-lite. Keystones, Closers, the worm — the film explains exactly as much as each scene needs and not a sentence more. It mostly works on dream logic, but the middle act asks you to nod along a couple of times.
• The romance is the thinnest of the trilogy. Suzume’s devotion to Souta arrives faster than the film strictly earns — the story justifies it thematically by the end, but you have to extend credit for an hour first.
• One late-film emotional beat between Suzume and her aunt detonates brilliantly and then resolves a shade too quickly for the damage it does.

That’s the whole list. Against it stands the funniest, warmest, most confident filmmaking of Shinkai’s career.

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📌 FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions

Is Suzume worth watching?

Absolutely — a 9/10. It is Makoto Shinkai’s funniest and most mature film in one: a road-trip adventure with a talking chair on the surface, and a moving story about grief and growing up underneath.

Do I need to watch Your Name or Weathering With You first?

No — Suzume is completely standalone with no cameos or plot connections. That said, our recommended order is Your Name first, then Suzume, then Weathering With You, ranked by overall quality.

What is the deal with the chair in Suzume?

Souta, the male lead, spends most of the film transformed into a three-legged children’s chair — Suzume’s childhood keepsake. It sounds absurd, works brilliantly, and the missing leg is quietly one of the film’s most meaningful details.

Is Suzume suitable for kids?

We say 10 and up. There is no graphic content, but the film engages earthquake themes with real weight, uses Japan’s actual disaster-alarm sound, and the final act deals openly with grief. Sensitive kids may need a co-viewer.

How successful was Suzume?

It grossed around 314 million dollars worldwide and finished its Japanese run with about 14.8 billion yen. It also competed at the 2023 Berlinale — the first anime in the festival’s competition since Spirited Away 21 years earlier.