How the 2011 Japanese earthquake shaped new anime film Suzume
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The anime films of Makoto Shinkai are fantastically imaginative: 2016's Your Name centered on male and female protagonists who keep swapping bodies, while 2019's Weathering With You revolved around a girl who could control the weather. But these colorful creations are rooted in real-life tragedy. In particular, the director tells EW that his new film Suzume — whose titular protagonist travels around closing dangerous interdimensional portals — was directly shaped by the catastrophic earthquake that struck Japan on March 11, 2011.
The strongest earthquake in Japan's history (and the fourth most powerful since the beginning of modern records in 1900), it caused more than 19,000 deaths and led to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. It is sometimes referred to simply as "3/11" in Japan, the way Americans refer to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks as "9/11."
"Suzume is very much rooted in the 2011 earthquake that hit the Tohoku region," Shinkai tells EW via a translator. "At the time I was in Tokyo, so a bit far from the epicenter of the earthquake. I'm not a firsthand victim, but it really affected the very fabric of Japanese society and affected me quite personally. It changed my own worldview and approach to how I create, how I put messages into anime itself. With Suzume, I think I wanted to come face to face with the disaster and understand what it meant."
crunchyroll Characters from the anime film 'Suzume'
The possibility of a disaster like the 2011 earthquake hangs over Suzume. After meeting the handsome-but-mysterious Sōta (Hokuto Matsumura in Japanese, Josh Keaton in English), Suzume learns that certain doors scattered around Japan have the potential to open portals to the supernatural entity Sōta calls "The Worm." If a door stays open long enough for the Worm to fully manifest, the surrounding area will be completely wiped out as if in a natural disaster. The challenge for Sōta and Suzume, then, is to close these doors before it's too late.
Shinkai's films — such as Suzume, in theaters now — are remarkable for how much they focus on saving lives. Although American cinema remains awash in superhero movies, few of these stories dedicate much time anymore to saving people — they're more often about intense personal grudges or high-level battles with supervillains.
Suzume, by contrast, is constantly striving to save people from impending disasters they aren't even aware of. It's not just about rescuing people she's never met; eventually, it also becomes her responsibility to save Sōta from losing his humanity. That puts a human face on these massive dangers — something that Your Name does as well. Although that film starts as a body-switch comedy, it then becomes about saving people from a disaster which one of the characters is in danger of being caught up in.
"It might seem like, 'Oh, Shinkai is making disaster movies.' But for me personally, I'm not setting out to do these massive, social commentary approaches to these disasters," Shinkai says. "Rather, as a director, I believe my strengths lie in more intimate narratives: very domestic, very local types of stories. If you look at all my past films as well, a lot of it is very personal and almost like this monologue or poem that these characters are exchanging among themselves."
Crunchyroll Poster for the film 'Suzume' by director Makoto Shinkai
Shinkai continues, "While there is this massive backdrop of a large-scale disaster, I look at how it affects people on an individual and personal level. That might seem like a contradiction, because disaster films usually engulf and envelop society as a whole. But that contradiction is what leads to the sense of both micro and macro levels in my films."
Given what he's accomplished in anime, one can't help but wonder if he'd ever use live-action filmmaking for his storytelling. Shinkai jokes, "I don't think I have what it takes to make that kind of Hollywood-scale disaster panic movie."
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