After running for one straight year, Suzume is finally available for Streaming on Crunchyroll. Crunchyroll recently announced that it has started streaming the highest-grossing film of 2023, Suzume by Makoto Shinkai.
Suzume made a total of $323.3 million collection on Box Office worldwide and became the fourth-highest anime film of all time. Even though popular anime like One Piece, Detective Conan, Dragon Ball Super: Superheroes, and Slam Dunk were also releasing their movie in 2022, the name Makoto Shinkai was enough to beat them all in the Box Office collection.
The hype for Suzume to release on a streaming platform was high since not every region has a theater, so fans couldn’t just go and watch it. But now Crunchyroll has given everyone a chance to watch such a good movie made by Makoto Shinkai.
Suzume Review
Anime is able to transport us into worlds beyond our imagination. Fantastical places in which we can forget about our gray everyday life and sink into an otherworldly place with exciting stories and never-ending adventures.
And as much as Makoto Shinkai’s films are able to do exactly that, transporting us into other worlds, telling us stories about time-traveling, weather gods, and mystical beasts. His new film, Suzumi, is not one of those films.
Our protagonist, Suzumi, meets a mysterious man who gets turned into a chair. They accidentally open up the portal for mystical creatures who tried to destroy Japan and have to fight an antagonistic force in the form of an evil-speaking cat.
If you have seen his latest two works, Your Name, and Weathering with You, you will immediately feel at home in the world of Suzume. The countryside of Kyoshu, in which Suzume lives, but every other set piece the film visits is breathtakingly animated.
Lush colors fill the screen with the way hair moves, rainfalls, and some reflections. All of this looks simply phenomenal. And familiar at the same time, there’s an immense love for details, especially when the film just pauses for a second to soak in the beautiful scenery, and you are able to see how meticulously crafted the landscapes actually are.
Taking Shinkai’s two previous films into account, Suzume feels like the final part of a Trilogy that Shinkai has been working on for over the last decade. They all have a coming-of-age storyline that includes Supernatural elements and has a back-and-forth between the countryside of Japan and life in a metropolis as a central characteristic of their film.
But still, Suzume is different than his previous two works. Suzume is focused on the environment, and Makoto Shinkai repeatedly stated in interviews that recent earthquakes and climate change have been aspects that concerned him deeply.
And if you look a bit closer, all three films center around this topic in some way. Your Name has been about a deadly meteor, Weathering with You is about climate change and rising sea levels, and Suzumi deals with the constant threat of earthquakes destroying the country.
The only difference between his two previous films is that now he addresses these issues upfront. You can watch Your Name as a time-traveling romance or lose yourself in the beautifully portrayed Tokyo of weathering with You without noticing the environmental undertones.
But in this film, earthquakes aren’t openly stated threat. Shinkai is a master of talking about themes that seem enormous, like the threat of climate change, able to compress it into an entertaining piece of art that, if we ignore it, simply enjoy it for what it is, an entertaining piece of art.
Where to Watch Suzume Online?
Suzume has started streaming from November 16, 2023, for selected regions. It will be available to watch exclusively on Crunchyroll in the Japanese language with English subtitles.
However, it is only available for a few countries like the USA, Europe, Africa, Oceania, the Middle East & CIS. As for now, Suzume is only streaming in this region. Hopefully, Crunchyroll will soon release it for every region.
