• Courtesy Of Crunchyroll
• A teen races across Japan trying to close interdimensional doors in Shinkai's gorgeous, emotionally weighty animation.

What would it even mean to get closure on the losses in our personal and collective histories? That's the question at the core of Suzume (originally titled Suzume no Tojimari, or "Suzume's Locking Up"), the new visually stunning animation from writer-director Makoto Shinkai (Your Name., Weathering With You). A nominee for the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival and the fourth-highest-grossing movie to come out of Japan, Suzume is currently playing in subtitled and dubbed versions at Essex Cinemas, Majestic 10 and Merrill's Roxy Cinemas.

The deal

Seventeen-year-old Suzume (voiced by Nanoka Hara in the Japanese version) lives with her aunt in the seaside town of Kyushu. Though her life seems happy on the surface, her mother, who died when she was 4, haunts her dreams.

Suzume meets an enigmatic young man named Souta (Hokuto Matsumura), who says he seeks ruins with doors in them. Smitten with him, she trails Souta to an abandoned resort, where she finds a door that seems to open into another world.

Suzume's encounter with the door — and the mysterious cat-creature guarding it — renders her suddenly capable of seeing disaster looming over her city in the form of a coiling, dragon-like "worm." As people's phones light up with earthquake alerts, Souta reveals that he is a "Closer," tasked with shutting the dimensional doors that open in abandoned places and allow natural disasters to emerge.

A clash between Souta and the mischievous cat-creature (Ann Yamane) ends with Suzume's crush being transformed into her childhood three-legged chair. Awkward! In this ungainly form, Souta needs help closing the doors, and the two young people embark on a road trip to save Japan from further catastrophes.

Will you like it?

In the West, Shinkai's work is often compared to that of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli — a comparison that, the director suggested in a recent interview with fandom.com, reveals our ignorance of the rich variety of Japan's animation landscape.

It is an easy parallel to draw, however, simply because most Hollywood animated films look so one-note and impoverished when we place them beside Suzume or Miyazaki's Spirited Away. These are movies that unfurl their own rich landscapes on natural, supernatural and emotional planes.

Suzume visits many places on her journey, from a rural tangerine farm to a bullet train to metropolitan Tokyo. Each feels fully realized, the details rendered with a mixture of hand-drawn and digital animation. The ocean sparkles in magic sunset light; fields glow vibrant green as they spread to the horizon.

Yet this beauty has a dark edge, because so much of the country has been harrowed by previous disasters. Interdimensional portals spewing forth monsters are nothing new in fantasy fiction, but the theme has an emotional resonance in Suzume that it lacks in, say, "Stranger Things."

There's an intuitive poetic rightness to the notion of these doors opening in places such as a middle school or an amusement park, where children played in the days when Japan had a more substantial population of young people. When Suzume eventually returns to her own abandoned place, the home where she once lived with her mother, we learn that her personal tragedy coincided with a collective one that shaped the experience of a generation.

Rather than spelling out this historical context, however, Shinkai allows it to seep into our consciousness. A child could see the film as pure escapist fantasy, only to rewatch it a decade later and weep with deeper understanding.

Suzume features just enough frenetic action to keep the attention of more mature kids. The adorably demonic cat, a trickster spirit prone to chirpy affirmations such as "Lots of people are going to die!," is highly meme-able. But the film's overall mood is elegiac, and by the end, adults may find themselves in tears.

Some fantasy fans might carp about the story's world-building. There are no true villains, only natural forces whose destructive power waxes and wanes for reasons that remain mysterious. Against the impersonal danger posed by these forces, Suzume places the humble pleasures of human love and sociability. The film features not one but three scenes of people forming bonds by sharing food — scenes that would probably be ruthlessly excised for "not advancing the plot" if they ever dared to appear in a three-act Hollywood screenplay.

But it's these quieter scenes, not the requisite pulse-pounding action sequences, that give Suzume its cumulative power. If there's a moment that's sure to have the whole theater rapt, it's the one involving the genesis of Suzume's silly little three-legged chair, which is both a comic sidekick and an object imbued with several layers of meaning.

By the film's end, we learn that some doors aren't meant to be closed. But we can learn to live with the phantoms of our past selves who lurk within, still grieving and hoping with the intensity of childhood.

If you like this, try...

Your Name. (2016; Crunchyroll, rentable): Two high school students who have never met begin swapping bodies in the animated romantic fantasy that established Shinkai's international reputation.

Weathering With You (2019; HBO Max, rentable): As in Suzume, there's a theme of environmental anxiety in this Shinkai film about an orphan who can control the weather.

Kiki's Delivery Service (1989; HBO Max, rentable): Shinkai has said this Miyazaki classic about a witch influenced Suzume; both are coming-of-age tales in which a young woman encounters many different potential role models.