, though, Shinkai surrenders to the inevitable by putting his teenage heroine in pursuit of a magical talking cat named Daijin. Daijin is wide-eyed, adorable, and decidedly Ghibli-esque — like a sinister sibling of Jiji from, given that wherever he goes, disaster seems to follow. But if Daijin is a nod to the king of Japanese animation, he’s also a reminder of just how different Shinkai’s work is in how it blends magical adventure with contemporary details.
It’s also about saving the day and falling in love under the skies that are Shinkai’s signature: striated with feathery clouds, strewn with stars, offering a vast gradient of blues and purples. If Shinkai’s protagonists start off in worlds marked by mundane textures — like the details of the bright, cluttered house that 17-year-old Suzume lives in with her aunt, Tamaki , in a seaside town in Kyushu — those skies represent the promise of grandeur.
That worm is a take on the giant catfish that, in myths, lives under Japan and causes seismic disruptions whenever the god tasked with holding it down with a stone slips in his duties. But it also brings to mind Haruki Murakami’sin which a downtrodden salaryman is visited by a giant frog who asks for his help battling a worm under the city in order to stop it from, yes, causing an earthquake.
Catastrophe runs through the film like silvery scar tissue — Suzume’s mother died in the 2011 earthquake — but behind that is the more gradual crisis of the shrinking population responsible for so many of the abandoned areas where the worm is able to escape. Countering this decline, in the film’s loveliest idea, is the community and connection Suzume gets from the strangers who help her along the way, and from the exasperated but loving aunt who raised her.
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