Suzume 1

Girl meets boy. Boy turns into...a chair?

Based on the Golden Globes-nominated hit blockbuster, this story blends the best of fantasy, coming-of-age, and road trip stories while also exploring the aftermath of traumatic environmental disasters on both a deeply personal and a national scale.

High school junior Suzume runs into a handsome stranger, Souta, who tells her he is looking for a door and asks where he can find ruins in her town. She points him toward a resort that has long fallen past all hope of repair, then thinks better of it and races after him to warn him of the danger of trespassing there. While fruitlessly searching for Souta, Suzume opens a door seemingly to nowhere and finds a starry landscape stretch out on the other side of the frame. Later, at school, she realizes she’s the only one who can see an ominous, worm-like colossus emerge from the mountains and rushes back to the ruins where she finds Souta struggling to shut the monster back in the door. Suzume helps Souta close the door on the mythical worm, which is revealed to be the cause of massive earthquakes, never knowing that her involvement would soon leave Souta trapped in the three-legged wooden chair Suzume’s late mother crafted for her and send them both on a cross-country race to seal all the worms away and save Japan from devastation.

Director Makoto Shinkai took the world by storm with his animated movies Your Name and Weathering with You. His works are heavily inspired by the beauty of Ghibli films and often feature both intensely personal drama as well as the visceral fear of looming environmental disaster.