▶ Video I was still very young when my family told me that portions of my Armenian family tree were murdered in the Armenian genocide. I understood that it was a terrible thing, but it was only when I was older and I heard my grandmother and grandfather talk more about who these people were that it dawned on me that there was an entire element of my ancestral life that I would never know. It dawned on me that it wasn’t just names of people, or the desert that they were forced to march through to their deaths from heat or into early concentration camps; there was a distance that time had created, and given my young age, it would only grow more pronounced with each passing day. It is forever in the past, regardless of how present it is for my own ancestral story. In my youth, I just couldn’t understand, and even well into my adulthood, there’s a part of me that still cannot. But I never stop trying.

Trying to understand or comprehend tragedy in the wake of disaster is integral to Suzume no Tojimari, but in a way that is not so readily obvious. If you take the film purely at its most non-allegorical visual level, there is no large-scale on-screen disaster or death that we really see aside from the first door-emergent worm that causes some moderate damage. Disaster tends to be framed as something that happens on a profoundly devastating scale, either for the individual person or the larger societal whole. Without this visual aid, one can cynically ask how we’re supposed to grasp the significance of a disaster that either happened or is about to, but never does?

An answer lies in the film’s sense of landscape. Art director Tanji Takumi, with Shinkai as storyboarder, took pains to make the numerous abandoned places where the doors are kept feel like fully-realized three-dimensional spaces, with the doors adding a touch of ethereal air. And they need to be that way. Decrepit piles of stone, wood, metal, and overgrow were all, at one point or another, visited and populated, and if you’ve ever explored an abandoned location before, there always seems to be something surrounding you that feels unfamiliar and you can’t quite pinpoint. It’s as if the ghosts of the past are still there. There is indeed tragedy in that; these places, once teeming with life, now do not. When Sōta asks Suzume to remember those who used to reside in the spaces in order to close the doors, she sees flashes of a past that is unknowable to her, but one she still glimpses. Creating the doors between the past and the present is how any disaster, regardless of its form, is remembered.

In relying upon the 2011 Tōhaku earthquake and tsunami, Shinkai as director and scriptwriter is deliberately calling upon an event just recent enough that Japanese youth live in its aftermath, even though some of the film’s audience haven’t even become teenagers yet. Unlike your name or Weathering With You using metaphor for their disasters (and it’s debatable the extent to which they worked), he aimed to have the event itself become too integral to the text to separate it. We see fingerprints of this intent sprinkled throughout the movie – it occurs in textual alerts of earthquakes, an iconography commonplace in Japan such that the background characters don’t pay them much heed most of the time, to list just one example that is perhaps most-relevant to our modern world.

But most significantly, it occurs in the various people that Suzume and Sōta meet in their journey to close the doors. Most of the cast in the film either reside near, or have memories connected to, abandoned locations. Yet each has, in their own way, accepted that what has happened has happened, and actively strives to live a more-hospitable life and live on one happier, caring moment longer (if not in an overly saccharine manner). Suzume gradually begins to shed her old wardrobe as it gets increasingly dirty and disheveled, as the ensemble cast helps her by feeding her meals and having a cordial communication that Suzume had, perhaps, taken for granted given her less-than-glamorous remarks about her aunt.

And it therefore comes as no surprise that, as they travel together, Suzume and Sōta themselves gradually become closer as disaster, both beyond the Ever-After and in the immediate reality, looms over them. In traveling and preventing disasters, Suzume and Sōta are treated by the mischievous Daijin as objects—literally in the case of Sōta, which is a funny inversion of how it’s female anime characters that tend to be objectified by the viewer—of play. It’s not long until the darker undercurrent of what’s happening makes itself known to them. But as the journey enters its final climax and their own personalized disasters come to the fore, they take all the lessons of abandonment, tragedy, and remembrance and make one final bid to lock the ultimate door.

In character, landscape, allegory, and affect, Suzume no Tojimari is thus a film that pleads with its audience to not forget the past in terms of the places it once held, the people who once lived in it, and the things (lovely and terrible) that once happened there. This is not a “those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it” narrative, but rather a narrative that encourages an exploration of our own personal, geographical, and societal doors to witness an Ever-After that we can only glimpse, but not actually reach. There is always time to mourn, and likewise, there is always time to discover or rediscover. Even if you cannot understand disaster and its fallout fully, it is better to understand a little than to not understand at all. Ironically, in its characters closing doors, the film asks its audience to open theirs.

In that spirit, it is perhaps Shinkai’s most life-affirming and cohesive work, and one that fits most snugly at home in his growing comfortability telling quasi-sekaikei apocalypticism and romance.