I first caught Suzume no Tojimari (すずめの戸締まり) at an IMAX theatre, but it was later announced that, like the recent trend set off by Violet Evergarden the Movie, Suzume will also be getting a Dolby Cinema screening. And as luck would have it, director Shinkai Makoto will be coming to the local Dolby Cinema to give a talk after the screening of the movie. And so, I decided to spend Christmas Eve going on a "date" with Shinkai Makoto.
This makes it the fourth time I am watching Suzume, after the first time at IMAX, the second for the all-Japan stage greeting, and the third time to get a copy of "Shinkai Makoto Book 2".
First, I will touch on the Dolby Cinema version of Suzume, after which I will try to do a brief report on the session with director Shinkai Makoto. This session contains a lot of spoilers, so for those who don't like spoilers, you can stop reading once you see a photo with the director.
Regarding the Dolby Cinema version of Suzume, I must say that, visually, there doesn't seem to be a lot of difference. It is like the SDR version and the HDR version are almost the same. I think this is because a lot of the movie itself uses a more matt/flat colour palette. There just aren't many scenes where the colour contrast can be amplified by the Dolby experience. There were only a few scenes in which I noticed a visible difference. If only they had done a bit more to remaster the scenes for Dolby... it looked more like they took the original movie and just passed it through a Dolby filter or something, without spending too much time on tuning each scene. I guess this can't be helped, since director Shinkai Makoto was very much on the road this entire time, going around Japan for stage greeting events.
As for audio, I think I was most shaken by the earthquake sounds this time, out of the four viewings so far. I guess this is a testament to the audio system at the Dolby Cinema, plus the work done during remastering of the audio. But when you take everything into consideration, overall, I don't think the Dolby Cinema version was really that much of a difference beyond the usual cinema experience. I guess I was spoilt by Violet Evergarden The Movie, where director Ishidate worked to make sure the Dolby Cinema version fully exploited the possibilities brought by Dolby.
Oh, starting from this week, they are handing out a small booklet that contains a story from the viewpoint of Tamaki (Suzume's aunt and guardian).(I subsequently translated the booklet: Suzume—Tamaki’s Story, unofficial translation of 小説すずめの戸締まり～環さんのものがたり～)
After the movie ended, the lights came on, and soon, director Shinkai Makoto came on stage. (Spoilers start after the following photos.)
Director Shinkai Makoto started off by asking the audience (a full house) how many times they have watched the
movie. Some (a minority) were here for the first time. Some have watched
it twice. A majority, though, have watched it at least three times, if
not more. Well, I myself was there for the fourth time... He then said that Castle in the Sky (天空の城ラピュタ) was the first movie that he watched with his own money. It is the movie that eventually led him to go down this career path.
Work on Suzume started after Weathering with You premiered in Japan (in August 2019). At that time, he wanted to create a new movie centred around adventure and convey a sense of excitement. One that goes around places in Japan that used to be popular but have since been abandoned. Who used to live there? In thinking about the places to visit on this adventure, Shinkai thought that the goal has to be the Tohoku region (which was struck by the Great East Japan Earthquake of 11 March 2011). Even though reconstruction is making progress in this region, the scars of the disaster (earthquake + tsunami + nuclear meltdown) are still there. Once he had the final destination of the road trip in mind, he started to flesh out the details.
He put forth his proposal for the movie to Toho, a bit apprehensive since it dealt with the theme of the earthquake disaster, still very fresh in the minds of those who lived through it. But he was encouraged when everyone bought the idea, and in April 2020, he started to work on the script.
Once the script was done, he spent one year and three months on the storyboard for Suzume. This was solitary work, in which he worked on developing a video storyboard with the scenes, adding in the voices of the characters on his own based on the script. He did all the voices except for young Suzume. She was voiced by his daughter, who Shinkai revealed is a child actress. He was amazed at how his daughter could be acting young Suzume crying, then get back to being all smiles and asking for her "fee". Each "recording session" cost him 500 yen, and he said in all, he paid her about 15,000 yen for voicing young Suzume in the video storyboard. This video storyboard is important because it would be used subsequently to give the voice actors an example of how he wants them to act out each scene.
And after spending so much time (I guess it was around two years?) working on his own, production of Suzume moved onto the next stage of full-scale production. This took about one years and eight months.
The session then moved to Q&A, with Shinkai taking questions from the audience. I was really shy so I never put up my hand, but it felt like everyone around me wanted to ask a question. And all the questions asked were quite specific. You know the person asking has watched the movie many many times...
The first question was about the sealing stones (要石), asking for more details as to how they work and such. Shinkai didn't want to go into too much details about his concept for this system, though, explaining that going into the details will lead future discussions into the relationship between humans and disasters, and he wanted to keep things vague so as to not make it too "real". After all, this is fantasy. Still, his idea is that there are probably many sets of such sealing stones, with different families who go about the task of "sealing doors" around Japan, of which the Munakata family (Sota's family) is one. He also felt that the stones need not be where the epicentre is. His idea of the eastern sealing stone (Sadaijin) being in Tokyo was that it was placed there by Sota's grandfather during the Great East Japan Earthquake (12 years before the main story of Suzume), and his grandfather's lost arm could be related to this event.
The next question was about why Orikasa Station (織笠駅) was chosen as the station for the final part of the movie, where Sota took the train to go back to Tokyo instead of going back together with Suzume, Serizawa, and Tamaki. Shinkai replied that he wanted to choose a place that could help symbolise reconstruction after the disaster. Orikasa Station was rebuilt on higher ground after the disaster. Another example is the road station Oya Kaigan (道の駅 大谷海岸), which was reopened last year after being rebuilt. This was the place where Suzume, Serizawa, and Tamaki stopped to wait out the rain.
The next question was again about a location featured in the movie. Shinkai was asked why the scene of Suzume taking the Shinkansen bullet train showed Kiyosu Castle (清洲城) outside the window, but Nagoya Castle on the phone's map app. Shinkai's reply was that he wanted to feature as many places as possible. In fact, he said that when he went to Nagoya, the people there thanked him for featuring the city in the movie. On a technical note, he mentioned that, in film-making, moving right conveys moving forward into the future, so he wanted to choose a castle that is on the left side of the Shinkansen when it is traveling to Tokyo. You can see from the map (taken from Google Maps) that Kiyosu Castle is right beside the Shinkansen, on the left when going toward Tokyo. Nagoya Castle is also nearby too.
The next question was related to Daijin (the sealing stone cat/spirit). Shinkai mentioned that animals are commonly featured in Japan folklore. Usually, someone helps an animal, and the animal does something to repay that kindness. At the same time, his image of Daijin is that it is still very much a child, and even though it understands its important role as a sealing stone to prevent disasters, it also wants to play.
The final question was about whether this is the same "world" as Your Name. and Weathering with You. Shinkai replied that, because Suzume dealt with the more serious topic of the Great East Japan Earthquake, he intentionally did not want to link it to the worlds of his previous works. So while Taki and Mitsuha made an appearance in Weathering with You, Hodaka and Hina did not appear in Suzume. And while the music "Itomori High School" (糸守高校) was used in a scene (when Daijin was being reported on the morning news), this is more because this piece of music has been used as BGM for TV programs in Japan, so he wanted to use this piece more to convey the familiar feeling of "regular TV" rather than drawing a specific reference to the world of Your Name.
Finally, before the end of the event, Shinkai mentioned that the movie will be shown overseas in the future. He is, however, still a bit uncertain whether the movie should be packaged purely as entertainment, or together with its central theme of the Great East Japan Earthquake. This is because, unlike Japan, most people overseas would not have any knowledge or feel any affiliation with the earthquake disaster. At the same time, this earthquake disaster is at the very heart of the movie. I guess we will know the final marketing approach when the movie premiers next year in the U.S.
I might have left out some parts of what was touched on in this session. My apologies! I was trying to take notes but not many people were doing so... so I felt a bit shy and was trying not to be too obvious in my note-taking. And my handwriting is horrible. There is this note "人間がいるからXX" and I just cannot make out what the "XX" means...
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