Movie Review—Suzume

Suzume is a high schooler in Kyushu who was orphaned when she was a little girl. She has been living with her aunt for ten years. One day a young man asks her if there are any ruins nearby. Intrigued, she goes there herself. She sees a lone door standing amidst wreckage. When she opens it she sees an otherworldly realm, but cannot reach it. She also sees a carving of a cat, which see pulls out of the ground. It comes to life and runs away.

After that, a monstrous creature comes out of the doorway, causing an earthquake. She and the young man—Souta—are barely able to close the door and avoid disaster. It turns out the cat was a guardian meant to keep the door closed. Suzume and Souta chase the cat across Japan, trying to shut other doors and prevent ever-increasing disasters.

Suzume has flashbacks of herself as young child, wandering around, looking for her mother. But are these memories? Or is she seeing herself in that other realm?

Suzume ranges from scenes of delicate beauty to looming horrific disaster. This is high quality animation, with good detail and realistic motion, no matter how odd the chase scenes are. What stuck in my mind was the kindness Suzume experiences on her journey: From a young woman her age hauling fruit, to a mother who sees her at a bus stop where the next bus will not come for hours, they all want to help her. Suzume does chores for room and board, which is heartening so see.

The director, Makoto Shinkai, has openly said he was influenced by Super-Frog Saves Tokyo, which also involves preventing an earthquake. That in turn must have been influenced by the Japanese myth of Namazu, the giant catfish beneath Japan that causes earthquakes.

The movie has a couple of weaknesses. I suppose this is where I put SPOILERS. Suzume and Souta spend the movie as travel buddies. Then towards the end she tells her aunt that she loves him. This is very sudden. Also, her aunt becomes unaccountably cruel in one scene and tells Suzume she wasted the best years of her life caring for her. It is unclear if another door guardian is making her say these things, but it is unsettling.

So Suzume is well worth watching. Definitely do not walk out the minute the credits start rolling. For those of you who are Makoto Shinkai fans and love his movie Your Name, have your friends watch Suzume first. It is hard for Shinkai to live up to his masterpiece, Your Name.

Norwescon 3—Supplemental

Last year, I took a lot of pictures, which took a long time to post. This year, I took much less.

 

 

 

 

 

Below, we see Batman and Robin getting photobombed by the Penguin.

 

Torrey Stenmark is in her floor costume below. She has the kind of light saber that sizzles. She recognized me, so she flicked it and made it sizzle as she walked by, which startled me.

 

Here she is in her Masquerade costume. I asked her who her character was. She asked me if I had seen Top Gun. I hadn’t, so I was a little puzzled.

 

Perhaps this will help.

 

click to enlarge

Norwescon 2—Supplemental

Norwescon was held at a hotel near the SeaTac airport. Here’s a view with an airliner taking off in the upper left.

 

I should have said in yesterday’s post that Kimberly Unger was one of the speakers on the subject of AI—or not really AI, just machine learning.

 

 Later, she won the Philip K. Dick award for best paperback novel (science fiction of fantasy) published last year. Here she is with the award for her book, The Extractionist.

For me, the best event was a workshop called “Plotting Your Novel with Save the Cat!“ A lot of people have good writing skills. They can write interesting scenes. But they are told their story structure will not attract readers. Our instructor, Emily Leverett, went over in detail the best story structure that works over and over again, using the book Save the Cat! Writes a Novel, by Jessica Brody.

As Emily Leverett emphasized, this is not a matter of imposing a wooden template that gets rid of originality. The story template comes from observing successful novels and movies. It can be seen in stories as diverse as The Lord of the Rings novels, the Star Wars movies, Jane Austen novels, the movie Legally Blonde, etc.

As to what the phrase Save the Cat! means, buy the book. It will do you good.

Norwescon 1—Supplemental

First a personal message:

Hello, HAZZARD. If you are reading this, it was pleasant to talk to you. You may already be familiar with the Medieval play “Everyman.” If not, I strongly encourage you to read it.

Mark

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Norwescon is the biggest science fiction/fantasy convention in the Pacific Northwest that has a good focus on writing. Interestingly enough, the subject of AI was big. Although, panelists who spoke about it did not see it as an end-of-the-world development.

What they said is we do not have true AI (artificial intelligence) yet. What we have is machine learning that can do specific tasks. This machine learning is becoming rapidly more sophisticated. A number of editors said they are getting submissions written by these supposed AI programs. They say they can easily spot them.

So it is not a threat. Yet.

As an odd coincidence, the hotel parking lot has a robot security drone. An anonymous source said they had had some catalytic converters stolen out of cars, but this drone took care of the problem.

One conventioneer said he looked out his window one morning and saw a Dalek in the parking lot.

Never fear, there was a real Dalek there.

I thought it would be cool to have designed the security robot like a Dalek. But it might not be taken seriously. The sleek functional look is better.