earthquakes

Suzume (2023)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

It’s generally hackneyed for Western critics to compare any (or, in some egregious cases, all) modern anime directors to the legacy of Hayao Miyazaki, but it’s especially hackneyed to invoke that name when praising Makoto Shinkai, who’s been slapped with the ill-fitting label “The Next Miyazaki” at least since he made 5 Centimeters per Second two decades ago.  I am a little guilty of this hack behavior myself, having compared the way Shinkai lovingly illustrates the beauty of urban settings with the way Miyazaki illustrates the majesty of Nature – twice, when reviewing both his breakout hit Your Name. and its lesser loved follow-up Weathering with You.  And even though his latest film, Suzume, is partially set in the Japanese city of Miyazaki and features a direct shout-out to the Miyazaki-penned Whisper of the Heart, I really need to break the habit of typing that name every time a new Shinkai picture rolls through American cinemas.  We all do.

At this point, Shinkai’s closest comparison point might be someone who only occasionally dabbles in animation: Wes Anderson.  The 50-year-old industry long-timer has tripled down on his schtick so hard since Your Name. broke out in 2017 that his stubborn resistance to explore new visual or thematic territory has become endearingly stubborn in a distinctly Andersonian way.  I know exactly what I’m going to get from a Makoto Shinkai picture long before I buy a ticket and accompanying popcorn bucket: a supernatural romance between youngsters distanced by Japan’s urban/rural divide – their lives eventually united though fast-moving trains, widespread disaster, and the transformative power of love.  Shinkai’s non-existent lenses will “flair” across his CG-smoothed train rides and exquisitely detailed hand-drawn backdrops in the exact same way every single picture, and the only question, really, is what supernatural device he will use to keep his lovelorn teens apart.  He’s been so consistent in his recent output that he’s inspired his own crop of shameless imitators (as evidenced by other, lesser teen romances like Fireworks & I Want to Eat Your Pancreas) the same way that Wes Anderson’s retro, symmetrical wit inspired aggressively unwitty flicks like Garden State & Napoleon Dynamite.  The thing with both directors is that no matter how familiar & insular their respective filmmaking styles have become, they’re both still delivering vividly entertaining work every project.  I don’t know that Shinkai will ever match the soaring teen emotions of Your Name., but the artistry of his two triple-down follow-ups still coasts miles above most modern animation.  Like with Anderson, his work remains impressively gorgeous & earnest in the moment even if it’s no longer surprising or novel in the larger context of his career.

In this particular game of Makoto Shinkai Mad Libs, a rural teenager stumbles across a magical doorway guarded by a stone cat figurine that her touch brings to life.  When the impish cat-god scampers away, the unguarded door opens to unleash gigantic flaming tendrils from The Other Side that slam down on her unsuspecting hometown, threatening to destroy everything & everyone she knows in devastating earthquakes.  A college-age hunk she immediately crushes on teaches her how to close & lock this dangerous door, then joins forces with her to return the cat-god to its rightful station.  Only, the little feline prankster turns the hunk into a talking chair, which makes the heroic pair’s already awkward romance even more uneasy.  From there, Suzume and her wooden-chair beau chase the kitten around Japan, closing all the doorways to the afterlife that open without its protection along the way.  The wide-scale tragedy of the resulting earthquakes is treated seriously and is eventually tied to the 3/11 tsunami disaster that devastated Japan in 2011.  That historical context piles a lot of emotional heft onto the youngsters’ flirtatious relationship, but it’s also lightened by the physical awkwardness of their predicament.  In some ways turning the older boy into a talking chair makes him a less threatening object of desire for his teen-girl counterpart, but the movie still has cheeky fun in moments when he is visibly flustered that Suzume sits in his “lap.”  When she asks, vacantly, “Um, why are you a chair?” in perfect teenage aloofness, Shinkai is winking a signal that it’s okay to giggle at the outlandish premise.  Even so, the physical object the boy inhabits is eventually afforded its own emotional heft in Suzume’s backstory, so that his transformation is rooted in a tsukumogami Japanese folklore tradition instead of a LOL, So Random flippancy.  By the time Suzume crosses the gates of Hell to rescue her chair from the afterlife and defeat the flaming earthquake tendrils for good, there’s no question how seriously we’re supposed to take their relationship.

As easy as it is to become jaded about Shinkai’s tendency to repeat himself, there’s also no denying that he’s good at what he does.  By the film’s fiery emotional crescendo where Suzume is struggling to dislodge her new chair friend from his Arthurian stone prison while the world ends around them, it’s incredible how breezy the journey to get there felt in retrospect.  It’s as if you were so distracted by the frustrations of retrieving an escaped kitten that you didn’t even notice you opened the forbidden Hell door from Little Nemo’s Adventures in Slumberland during the frantic search (a formative film that I beg you not to scan its production credits, to spare me further self-inflicted accusations of hackiness).  Shinkai has a way of building to immense wonder & awe even if you start out assuming you’ve seen it all before, and I’m starting to hope he never changes course.  I want him to follow the Wes Anderson career path where every subsequent Makoto Shinkai movie will be the most Makoto Shinkaingest movie the world has ever seen.  May we all survive the disasters of climate change long enough to see his anime equivalent of The French Dispatch in 2032.

-Brandon Ledet

The Night the World Exploded (1957)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

There’s been a lot of grumbling this week about the way Trey Edward Shults’s sophomore feature It Comes at Night was marketed as a straightforward horror film, with a lot of people expecting some kind of monster attack based on its title. I want to believe that in two weeks’ time at most, first weekend horror audiences’ expectations will no longer matter and It Comes at Night will still be a fantastic film long after they’re forgotten. Sometimes, the title or the advertising of a film does matter in the long-run, though. Sixty years after its theatrical release, I found myself similarly bummed by the movie promised in the title The Night the World Exploded. I didn’t exactly expect Earth to explode in the picture, but the title does suggest some kind of alien invasion or large scale sci-fi threat, an expectation backed up by its inclusion on a drive-in double bill with The Claw, a creature feature about a giant killer bird. Unfortunately, this world-threatening event is a much more pedestrian kind of sci-fi villainy: earthquakes. It seems that in mocking general audiences for their titular & genre-based expectations, I was setting myself up for a taste of my own medicine. It did not taste sweet; it was, in fact, quite bland.

The Night the World Exploded announces its tedium up front by opening its narration with a weather report. The air was cool, low 50s, in case you’re interested. Three scientists who study the weather are concerned with drastic shifts in air pressure, which is somehow alarming to their unproven invention: a machine that accurately predicts earthquakes before they occur. Government officials don’t believe the validity of this machine’s prediction and refuse to evacuate the area indicated for severe impact. Many die as a result. A machine that can accurately predict earthquakes is still science fiction speculation, but between 70s disaster epics like Earthquake & modern throwbacks like San Andreas it’s an idea that had since become old hat in terms of cinematic depiction. What makes The Night the World Exploded more distinct as a sci-fi film is the source of its disastrous earthquakes. Instead of merely being set off by shifting tectonic plates, the earthquakes in the film are the direct result of a previously undiscovered element found under Earth’s surface that’s harmless when wet, but explodes when dry. Once this source is determined, what follows is an odd version of a 50s sci-fi message movie like Them! or The Space Children where, unlike nuclear war, there’s nothing real life audiences can do to stop its threat, since it’s entirely fictional.

Besides the fear mongering built around a fictional element that could explode the Earth from under us, I admire The Night the World Exploded‘s ambition​ to make its threat a worldwide event despite its budgetary limitations as drive-in schlock. Stock footage of buildings crumbling, newsreels of disaster relief & widespread fires, and even images of war are wrangled by a fast-talking narrator who attempts to tell a worldwide story of scientists & governments in crisis. Its smaller scale story of the three-scientist team that discovers the explosive element in their underground cave explorations is much less interesting. You see, the sole female scientist of the crew is frustrated because she wants to become a wife ASAP, explaining, “I’m a scientist, but I’m a woman too.” She’s frustrated because she’s settling to marry the wrong man, due to her co-worker being too wrapped up in his research to take notice of her romantic desire for him. What a pickle! (Oddly enough, this is more or less the same plot as Doris Wishman’s nudie cutie Nude on the Moon.) I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler say that the world does not explode and the two scientists eventually get their happily-ever-after kiss. What’s questionable is which resolution is more anti-climactic.

It’s likely not fair that I’m judging The Night the World Exploded based on its failings to deliver the sci-fi horror I was expecting based on its title. However, I’d like to think that if the film were an especially well made or deliriously fun version of an earthquake disaster picture I would’ve been able to overcome my expectations. There were moments of stock footage inanity and scientists demonstrating what the explosive element could do to the Earth on a plastic globe that certainly pushed me towards having a good time, only to be routinely deflated by its limp, central romance. Still, the truth is that I was settling in to watch one kind of old fashioned schlock based on the film’s title and was disappointed when I was treated to another. I guess this should teach me some sort of empathy for audiences who settled in for something like Insidious or The Bye Bye Man when they bought a ticket for It Comes at Night and were instead shown a quiet art house reflection on the terrors of familial grief. Those audiences even have the moral upper ground in this situation in that they paid to see their disappointment on the big screen while I, a hypocrite, was just looking for a way to waste a morning on YouTube.

-Brandon Ledet