Review: ‘Suzume,’ about a girl who falls for a chair, is worth the price of a seat

Admirers of the gifted Japanese writer-director Makoto Shinkai will recognize his touch from the opening moments of his often entrancing new animated feature, “Suzume.” An affecting story about love and salvation, loss and memory, the movie opens on a dark-blue sky kissed by pastel-sunset pinks and purples, with stars that gleam like perfectly inlaid jewels. You might expect to see a fiery comet streaking past, much like the one that wreaked such beautiful havoc in Shinkai’s 2016 smash hit, “Your Name.” But the doom that looms here is of a different sort, rooted in somber memories of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake disaster, and realized in the form of a serpentine red monster, known only as the Worm, that portends yet another cataclysm in the making. This isn’t the first time Shinkai has raised the specter of environmental disaster within the context of a swooningly sentimental teenage fantasy, and if this one doesn’t achieve the dazzling intricacies or soaring emotional heights of “Your Name,” its easy blend of enchantment and feeling is nearly as hard to resist. Like that film and its follow-up, the lovely “Weathering With You,” “Suzume” has been a huge commercial success in Japan; it’s receiving an appreciably wide release in North American theaters, in both an English-dubbed version and a subtitled Japanese-language version.