Permanent link to this article: Suzumeno Tojimari | Travis' BLog
Reviews have a lot of subjective elements
First of all, let me state the conclusion. This is a seven-point movie, a relatively good commercial film. The visuals and music are impeccable, and Makoto Shinkai's taste for time-lapse photography is still flavorful, even more skillful.
However, this work is a failed attempt by Makoto Shinkai, trying to achieve both quantity and quality.
Let's talk about the plot setting of this work. Makoto Shinkai wants to express the process of reconstruction after a disaster, and how people overcome the darkness in their hearts after experiencing a catastrophe.
The intention is great, but the expression is overly obscure. To understand this intention, the audience needs a lot of external information to resonate and find a sense of identification.
As someone who lacks external information, I lack the personal experience of disasters and the crisis awareness in Japan, so I find it difficult to grasp the main theme of the film.
A commercial film that attempts to convey the horror of a disaster should be able to be appreciated by both the refined and the vulgar, rather than isolating the audience who lacks external information.
Here are two examples:
- "White Snake" in China, many reviews on IMDB cannot reflect why Fahai must seal the White Snake. The story of "White Snake" is clearly based on external information.
- "Monkey King: Hero Is Back," Chinese people love Sun Wukong, we know about his rebelliousness and his mischief in the Heavenly Palace, but for foreigners, their knowledge of Sun Wukong may be more related to Goku in "Dragon Ball."
Furthermore, let's have fewer plot devices like time loops. They only make the plot less plausible under scrutiny.
In comparison, Pixar and Hollywood animated films, due to their brainstorming creative process, set the premise first, establish the characters and the environment, provide some environmental stimuli and changes, and let the plot naturally grow and burst out. They rarely have such mechanical plot devices.
Lastly, the development of the romantic relationship feels too abrupt. In the previous works, fast-paced montage editing was used to quickly show a large amount of daily life, rapidly increasing the emotional connection between characters.
However, in this work, the likability between the male and female leads escalates unusually fast. It inevitably makes the motivations of the female lead seem inexplicable.
My immediate impression while watching the film was that the romantic storyline seemed to be added at the request of the investors after the script was completed. After finishing the film, I also came across similar rumors when browsing comments online, but I don't know if they are true or not.
Makoto Shinkai's films have always given people a sense of bittersweet youth. When I watched "Your Name" in high school, I always felt melancholic and unhappy. I rewatched it a few days ago, and I no longer felt the same way as before. After watching "Suzumeno Tojimari," when my friends and I had an intense discussion, one of my friends said the following.
Represented by "The Garden of Words"/"5 Centimeters Per Second" - "Your Name" - "Weathering with You," Makoto Shinkai's expression of love conveys a hazy affection of adolescence. However, when viewers who are still in their youth realize that with increasing knowledge and the passage of time, this emotion will eventually return to ordinariness, the fear of forgetting passionate memories will become the bitterness of losing youth. After watching "Your Name" for the first time, I hoped that I could maintain the same mindset when watching every work by Shinkai in the future, not wanting to forget, unwilling to forget. But today, perhaps it's time to make peace with myself.
Youth is fleeting, and Makoto Shinkai is no longer the same Makoto Shinkai as before. Perhaps after he explicitly discovered this youthful affection in his works, he wanted to make a change in this film.
But I feel that he wanted too much. He not only wanted to show the reconciliation between himself and his inner self after a disaster, but also wanted to depict a love story and the pursuit of the past. These elements can indeed be organically integrated, but they were not well executed in this film, making me feel a sense of disconnection.