Japanese film ‘Suzume’ at PVR: An evening with anime master Makoto Shinkai

Japanese anime director Makato Shinkai (top, left); stills from his latest film 'Suzume' (2022).

At 50, Japanese anime virtuoso Makoto Shinkai appears remarkably serene yet nimble — in mind and body. In India for a promotional tour of his latest film Suzume (2022), already a smash hit in Japan and other parts of Asia, he spent an intimate evening with fans — cosplaying fans, of course, and fans who travelled from as far as Allahabad and Kota to get a glimpse of him. His gentle humour belies the star status he enjoys among anime fans worldwide. The typical Indian questions came early on, but mercifully didn’t set the tone of the evening. “What do you think of India? Do you want to make a Bollywood film? What do you think of RRR?” To uproarious response, the filmmaker said: “When I visited in 2019, I witnessed how loud and passionate you guys are. Even filmmakers here are out there. In Japan, we watch silently and hide within ourselves.”

Shinkai is a huge star, as is his fanbase. Fans in the US, Europe and parts of Asia are known to write petitions to film studios and to him, demanding release of his movies. An asteroid, 55222 Makotoshinkai, is named after him. Radwimps, the Tokyo-based rock band with whom Shinkai has collaborated on his last three films including Suzume is a corollary to Shinkai’s fame: Radwimps begins its first North American tour this weekend in California. Shinkai has even had to call fans “unhealthy” once. In 2016, when his film Your Name premiered, young adults in Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and China watched and rewatched it. It went on to be a cinematic phenomenon.“It’s not healthy,” he had said, during an interview in Paris. “I don’t think any more people should see it.” The film had grossed more $300 million worldwide, making it the most successful anime film of all time — surpassing even Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away from 2001.

I am yet to reach Shinkai’s 50-year-old nimbleness and youth. I am just 49, and in 2015, when my daughter was four, I discovered Japanese animation genius Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. Since then, I have been processing Japanese anime slowly but progressively. I am one of those middle-aged moms who consider anime only sci-fi or cyber-apocalypse dramas. Listening to Shinkai seemed like a clue to understanding my daughter and her circle of fan friends at first. By the end of the evening, my appetite for Suzume on the big screen had doubled.

The experience on the big screen was breathtaking. Suzume is about many things. It is also so Miyazaki in tone and treatment.

Predictably, Miyazaki is an idol of Shinkai. At the Mumbai event, Shinkai said one of the biggest influences in his life as an animator, filmmaker, author and manga artist is Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky (1986), about the outer space and earthly adventures of Sheeta, an orphan girl. Like so many of Miyazaki’s films, the real subject of Shinkai’s first film Your Name is the contrast between the country and the city and an ode to a Japan that no longer exists. In Suzume too, Shinkai’s inspiration is a lost, abandoned Japan. The 2011 earthquake and tsunami that originated in Tohoku and left around 20,000 dead and millions displaced and abandoned is fuel for the story of Suzume and Sota. “Ruins are everywhere in the northern part of Japan. Many communities, old structures are abandoned. I see it everywhere and it is a theme that has been with me for a long time now,” Shinkai told the Mumbai gathering.

This is his second visit to India. In 2019, PVR Pictures had got him down to Delhi to promote his previous film Weathering With You (2019). Since then, PVR Pictures has consolidated itself as the leading distributor of anime titles in India tapping a fan base that grows bigger and more serious every year. The excitement of Sanjeev Bijli, executive director, PVR INOX, who was also present, was palpable. “Our expectations from Suzume are huge. It’s a segment that we are gung-ho about,” Bijli said, and fan questions took over — from similarities between Japanese and Indian traditions (“Not dance sadly, but music is also incredibly important in my films”; “Like you have the pitrupaksha, we have the obone, a time when our ancestors come to visit us); to his views of RRR (“a new flavour”; “the idea of one film for the entire family to go and watch together is aspirational”);  and about Suzume.

PVR has released 15 anime films in India between March 2019 and March 2023, with around Rs30 crore as box-office return. The best performing titles so far have been Jujutsu Kaisen: Zero, One Piece Film Red and Demon Slayer. Suzume is their biggest release so far: across 250 screens in 85 cities, with the bulk of screens in Mumbai, Delhi-UP, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.

Like Shinkai’s previous film, Weathering With You, Suzume is about young people who’ve inherited responsibility for a crumbling world they have to risk everything to save. Unlike Your Name, in which his departure from the kind of aesthetic Miyazaki introduced to Japanese animation was obvious through the use of rock music, Suzume is much closer to Miyazaki’s children-human-ecological configurations. Suzume, like almost all of Miyazaki’s films, is a poetic, visually-rich but unostentatious tribute to the mundane: a cluttered student apartment, a ramshackle red convertible, joggers and corporate rats teeming in public spaces, and instagram stories by the minute to further the plot. There is a cat, Daijin, again a very common fixture in Miyazaki’s films — Daijin could be a lost, morphed cousin of Jiji, the snooty cat in Kiki’s Delivery Service.

Shinkai grew up with an informal Miyazaki education through the 1980s and 1990s. He grew up in Nagano. “My father would take me by train for two hours before we would reach the closest movie theatre,” Shinkai recalled. The little red yellow chair with three legs in Suzume — the handsome hero in Suzume shape-shifts into the chair — is a direct inspiration from a chair that Shinkai’s father’s made for him when he was a toddler: “I remember feeling like that chair was my universe and my home. It was all mine.” It isn’t a surprise that Suzume isn’t the most sublime of love stories — hugging a weirdly cute piece of furniture with intense sighs ensures that. What sets Suzume apart is its brilliantly-orchestrated music by the rock band Radwimp, the visual finesse, the nostalgia-inducing Miyazaki touches and Shinkai’s inspiration from the real catastrophes of Japan. As Suzume braves a mythical worm threatening to envelop Tokyo by raising from under the earth and destroy humanity — an obvious inspiration of the mythical worm that first appeared in Haruki Murakami’s short story Super-Frog Saves Tokyo (2002) — it doesn’t matter what genre she is playing to. The hero has the new fan’s heart.