Yahoo News How new anime film Suzume brought a chair to life
The magic of animated filmmaking creates many opportunities for characterization and storytelling that are unavailable in live-action. Through the combination of moving drawings and voiceover acting, animated films can make animals talk and infuse magical beings with human personalities. But Suzume, the new anime film from director Makoto Shinkai (Your Name), breaks ground by bringing humanity to...a chair.
Let's back up. Suzume begins with the titular protagonist, a Japanese schoolgirl, encountering a strange but handsome young man named Sōta on her way to school one morning. Suzume soon learns that Sōta is traveling across Japan in order to seal doors that have become interdimensional portals to a destructive entity called "The Worm." She's willing to join him in this quest, but things get more complicated when they encounter a talking cat (a classic staple of animation), who, with one flick of its magical tail, transforms Sōta into a chair.
Crunchyroll Poster for the film 'Suzume' by director Makoto Shinkai
As a chair, Sōta can still talk and even move. In fact, he can run — which he does with gusto whenever he sees that cat again, desperate to make it restore his human form. Trust us when we say you've never seen anything quite like Sōta-chair running along the pavement (you can see some of it in the trailer above). According to Shinkai, that is because those parts of the film required a combination of 3D and 2D animation styles.
"I want to call out our team of 3D animators, who were able to give him that movement that we were looking for," Shinkai tells EW via a translator. "We initially did some experimenting and development using 2D, hand-drawn techniques to bring him to life. Given the fact that the character Suzume is hand-drawn, if we were able to hand draw Sōta as well, that would have simplified a lot of the production pipelines without needing so much compositing the two mediums together."
But, Shinkai continues, "There was something about the 2D-animated Sōta that didn't quite sit right with me. It felt almost too soft, too alive — and, in some ways, too full of soul. What I wanted to do was invoke that feeling of being trapped inside of something very rigid and cold. The 3D animation techniques were better suited to convey that on screen through animation."
Crunchyroll The character Sōta is turned into a chair in Makoto Shinkai's anime film 'Suzume'
Sōta's chair transformation is not the first time Shinkai has played around with his character's physical bodies. His 2016 film Your Name revolved around two teenagers, a boy and a girl, who keep switching bodies. Those body transformations were about the excitement and promise of youth.
"With the body-switching phenomena in Your Name, I thought a lot about adolescence, puberty, and trying to recall my own experience with them," Shinkai says. "There was a huge transformation, both in my body as well as in my mind. I was full of both excitement and fear of what was to come from the result of that. I thought it was a very fantastic metaphor to physically swap the body and mind of those two characters. I think it is very representative of that experience that we all went through in puberty."
Sōta's experience as a chair is a little less positive, alas. Though Shinkai says Suzume's plot was influenced by the 2011 Japanese earthquake, it was also shaped by the experience of the COVID-19 lockdowns.
"I was working on the screenplay during the state of emergency lockdowns in Tokyo," Shinkai recalls, "when we were trapped inside of our small spaces at home. So it was perhaps a metaphor for that."
Shinkai continues, "But also, Japan as a whole is a small country: very disaster-prone; the economics are not what they used to be; the population is declining. I think there's a certain level of feeling trapped inside of this country, as well as in our homes, that metaphorically appeared as putting someone's soul into a very rigid and awkward moving chair."
Suzume is in theaters now.
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