Is the movie suzume like a game?
-About the destination that Suzume and her friends will eventually head to, does the place that the destination is modeled after actually exist?
Shinkai: The settings in suzume depict public places such as Ochanomizu Station and Shin-Kobe Station that actually exist, but the towns in Kyushu and Shikoku, including the final destination, are all fictitious. Although we tried to make them look like they actually exist in those areas, they were conceived and created for this film, including the locations where the ruins are located.
-So you made the film with the idea of a place that looks like some place in the 00 region? Another thing I felt a little more when I saw the movie was that Suzume and his friends’ journey is structured like an RPG, where they go to new places and meet friends, and events occur and there are events like boss battles.
Shinkai: If you ask me, that may be true. The story is structured like a quest in a game. However, I was not particularly conscious of this during production. I don’t think the fact that I used to work for a game company had much to do with it (laugh). I just wanted to depict the story in a way that the stages were constantly changing.
Suzume is a girl with a strong driving force that keeps moving forward without looking back. The reason for this nature will become clear during the course of the story, but she is also a character to whom we entrusted our feelings that we would like the audience to join us and pull us to places we have never seen before. To express this, I wanted the audience to see completely different sights spread out before their eyes in each location.
As a result of creating the film with this intention, we ended up with a film in which the various stages change just like in a video game. The part you mentioned as like a boss battle was actually called Kyushu Earthworm Battle or Kobe Earthworm Battle among the staff members (laugh).
During production, we would think about the theme of each stage scene, and what motif we would use for the background music. Games are also a medium that can tell a story, so perhaps I had a similar feeling when I was making the game.Why did Makoto Shinkai draw 「the disaster」?
Why did Makoto Shinkai draw 「the disaster」?
The novel The Frog Saves Tokyo by Haruki Murakami was also about fighting giant earthworms to prevent earthquakes. suzume has battles with earthworms in various places, but it also depicts a real-life earthquake, the Great East Japan Earthquake, which is one of the themes of the film. Why did you dare to depict that earthquake now?
Shinkai: More than 10 years have passed since the Great East Japan Earthquake, and I think that the disaster is becoming less and less a common experience for we Japanese. My daughter was born the year before the earthquake, and for her, the disaster is already an event in the textbooks.
Our films have many teenage viewers. There are many people who experienced the earthquake but were too young at the time to recognize it as an event that brought with it a great sense of reality. Still, I thought that now we could use the imagination of many people as an event in the past that we can still reach if we just reach out our hands a little. No, rather, I thought, 「If it is not now, it will be too late,」and that is why I included this theme in this film.
-Did you have any concerns or hesitations about using a major disaster as the subject matter of an entertainment film, and were you worried that you might be criticized for being inappropriate?
Shinkai: Naturally, when we decided to depict the earthquake as a theme, we talked about many things with the staff, and we all started production with the same determination. …… This is going to be a bit of a long talk, but may I?
-Of course.
Shinkai I will be 50 years old next year, and for the past 10 years in my 40s, with Your Name and Weathering With You, I feel like I have been making films while thinking about the disaster all the time.
The “once-in-a-thousand-year comet” in Your Name was also Drawing as a metaphor for earthquakes. The “huge disaster beyond human control” depicted in Weathering With You was also an idea that came to me because I experienced the earthquake in 2011, even though it did not directly depict the disaster.
-It is true that, if you ask me, the past two films were also about disasters.
Shinkai That The experience of the earthquake changed the way I think about things and the way I perceive the world. I feel like it was a second starting point for me. But it wasn’t just me. I think it was a change that most people living in Japan experienced inevitably.
That is why there have been countless creative works drawn influenced by the disaster. Shin Godzilla is one such example, and there have been many such works in live-action films, theater, and animation. There is also a major genre of earthquake literature, isn’t there?
I believe that the history of human beings is also a history of leaving behind stories of great tragedies. We have moved forward by thinking about tragedies that were beyond human control, somehow finding interpretations, and sublimating them into stories. I think suzume is one of the forms that are connected to the earthquake literature that has been written in this way.
In that sense, this work is not unusual. However, one thing I have been conscious of is that suzume is a very large scale film.
-Yes.
Shinkai: This film may be seen by a variety of people, from small children to adults. There may be many people for whom suzume is the first “story related to the earthquake” that they are exposed to.
For this reason, there were many things we had to think about. For example, we considered and repeated what kind of sound should be used for the sound of the earthquake alarm.
-The earthquake warning sound in the film is not the sound used in reality, or did you create a different sound from scratch?
Shinkai: Yes, it is a different sound. If we used the real sound, it would be indistinguishable from the actual alarm.
However, the earthquake warning sound from smartphones is now a part of our daily life, so if it is too far from the real thing, it would sound fake. That said, we don’t want to unintentionally startle people who come to see the film with the sound of a real alarm.
There were many things to keep in mind, but I wondered if there are any real” events that should not be represented as entertainment? I also think. If there was a rule that this matter must not be touched in an entertainment piece, it would be a tragedy, I think.
Just as various artists have been inspired by the disaster in their creations, suzume also aims to be a story that can be delivered because of its theme of the disaster. I can definitely say that suzume is a work that I gave it my all while thinking to the utmost so as not to hurt people as much as possible.
Thank you for watching. See you soon!
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