This is gonna be a short review, I just wanted to write down how I felt about this movie, not gonna go in-depth or anything.
When I saw the trailer for this movie over a year ago I was already thinking that it looked too similar to Shinkai's previous movies. From the character design, to the plot premise it wasn't really anything new, yet I still gave it a chance and watched it yesterday. From start to finish the movie played out pretty much exactly as I expected it to. There were no surprises, no interesting plot twists nor any real character development.
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The main character Suzume lives in a small town and encounters a man who is looking for ruins in the area. After a while she finds out that he's on a mission to close certain magical doors all across the country to prevent earthquakes and decides to go with him. For some reason the guy gets turned into a chair (??) so the entire movie is pretty much them going from one door to another and closing them so the Elden Beast (it literally looks the same) cant come out and cause more earthquakes.
After a while the movie starts to feel pretty repetitive, especially because there are no real stakes whatsoever up until a certain point pretty far towards the end of the movie, which means that none of the scenes where I'm supposed to feel anxious about what might happens next really work. The character interactions also fall flat most of the time, probably because one of the main characters is literally a chair, but also because none of them are that interesting in the first place. Suzume decides to follow Souta across the entire country, which is still understandable because she probably feels like it's her responsibility that all these doors are opening, yet she also risks her life for him and says that she can't imagine a world without him even though she's only known him for maybe a week and he was (once again) literally a chair for majority of the time?... Doesn't really makes sense to me. Design-wise it feels like a lot of the characters are straight up copy-pasted from Shinkai's previous movies, they're really unoriginal and I probably wouldn't be able to tell which side characters belong to which movie had I not just watched Suzume.
Credit where credit is due, the art and animation is absolutely beautiful from start to finish, as expected from a Shinkai movie. The world really feels alive due to all the small details and incredible animation. From the way the characters move around, to traffic being visible from miles away, the attention to detail is really impressive. I've also never seen a time-lapse in anime that was pretty neat. When it comes to sound-design I'd say it was pretty good, but there was nothing that really stood out to me, the music in particular was pretty forgettable.
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All in all Suzume is an alright movie that often feels dragged out and doesn't try anything new, but is still somewhat enjoyable due to its incredible visuals.
