April Movies Part 3: Suzume & The Super Mario Bros. Movie

If your month hasn't contained enough Japanese, or Japanese-adjacent, animation, then this blog post might help solve that problem. Whether you love anime or love playing Mario Kart, there's something to tickle your fancy at the movie theaters this month!

Suzume: Written and directed by Makoto Shinkai, this is a rather gorgeous movie about Suzume, a young girl who meets a stranger and gets entangled in a mysterious quest across Japan. The stranger is named Souta, and it turns out that his family business is as a Closer. There is a worm in a realm underneath Japan, and there are doors scattered around abandoned ruins across the country. If those doors are open, the worm will have a chance to escape and create earthquakes, so Souta's job is to travel to those doors and close them, thereby ensuring Japan is protected. 

Meanwhile Suzume is an orphan who was raised by her aunt after her mother was killed in the 2011 tsunami. We get some flashbacks to the young Suzume, heartbroken after her loss and running around the countryside refusing to believe her mother is dead. Without giving anything away, the movie takes a turn towards the end that is very emotionally moving and brings everything full circle to the trauma this girl faced at a young age. 

Like with any anime, there are also some cute elements; here we have a cat named Daijin, who keeps leading Suzume on a merry chase across Japan to find the open doors. And lest I forget, the reason Suzume is having to close these doors is because Souta gets cursed early in the film, and is turned into...a chair. So yeah, there's a talking chair, and Suzume has a crush on him, because again, this is anime, and age-inappropriate romances are the norm. The romance element felt a bit icky, but the rest of this film is a marvelous adventure with an emotionally resonant payoff. And every frame is a work of art, accompanied by a wonderful soundtrack by the band Radwimps and composer Kazuma Jinnouchi that I kept humming after I had left the theater. I watched a dubbed version where Nichola Sakura voices the main character, and she did a fantastic job, so if you want to revel in the animation without the distraction of subtitles, I would certainly recommend this voice cast. So go forth and be transported by this tale.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie: This movie was surprisingly great. Directed by Aaron Horvath and and Michael Jelenic and written by Matthew Fogel, it's a tight 90 minutes that fully delivers all the nostalgia you want, with lots of jokes and fun animation. My only comment upon leaving the theater was that I have no idea if this movie would make any sense at all to a person who had never played any kind of Mario game. But I, the most casual of gamers, was still thoroughly delighted by all the sly homages to the Mario universe, both visual and acoustic (I still can't get over a scene where Bowser is playing the piano and plays a classic Mario tune). 

The premise is simple - Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) are Italian-American plumbers who live in Brooklyn and are struggling to strike out on their own. They discover a mysterious Warp Pipe that sucks them into the Mushroom Kingdom but they get separated. Luigi is captured by Bowser's minions and is imprisoned in his castle, while Mario meets Toad (Keegan-Michael Key), who takes him to Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy), who has a plan to destroy Bowser and save the Kingdom. It's 2023, so the depiction of Peach is much more feminist, where she is a rousing leader of her people, active and agile and capable of fighting with the best of them. She takes Mario to the Jungle Kingdom to forge an alliance so they can fight Bowser with the Kongs, which is how Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen) also becomes a part of this movie. It all fits together beautifully.

This is a fun, breezy film that is colorful, clever, and charming. The voice cast is great, with all of these actors having a fun time, none more so than Jack Black who voices Bowser and recently has been climbing the music charts with his heartsick rendition of Peaches, a song about how much he loves Princess Peach. This movie is like playing any Mario game - there's not a vast amount of substance, but it's certainly addictive and entertaining. There are plenty of jokes and Easter eggs to suit every level of fan. So grab your kart and take a ride down Rainbow Road - wahoo!