It’s the classic tale: boy meets girl, boy turns into a chair, boy and girl stop natural disasters. Following the blockbusting environmental disaster melodramas of Your Name and Weathering With You, Makoto Shinkai’s latest revisits familiarly destructive ground, but whilst those films offered reassurance from a fantastical distance, Suzume (despite its cover’budge ing, talking chair) is far more realist. This is a memorialisation, grieving guidereserve and historical document with regards to’concerning’with respect to the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.###Having lost her parents to the disaster and since moved across the country, Suzume (voiced by Nanoka Hara) meets environmental vigilante Sōta (Hokuto Matsumura), a long-haired and lithe emo dream, brooding across Japan, stopping bulbous, electrified ‘worms’ that swarm into skies and crash with earth-quaking power. However, when Sōta is transin/with regard to’concerning’regarding med into the shape of Suzume’s beloved three-legged childhood chair, he becomes a passenger on a voyage through repressed memories, national trauma and community connection.###More cartoonish than his previous hyper-real urban animations, Shinkai’s style here is looser and expressively drawn.###So the pair embark on a road trip, meeting lots of individual , each with their own binds to the earthquake, gradually working their way back to Suzume's hometown, to face her memories and reckon with a nation’s pain — something visualised in a kaiju-dwelling hellscape, that aldespite’in spite of’albeit spectacular, diverts the film from its intense’fierce’exquisite er, ruminative episodes.###More cartoonish than his previous hyper-real urban animations, Shinkai’s style here is looser and expressively drawn, allowing in/with regard to’concerning’regarding a chair to trundle around with slapstick flails (inspired by the movements of Luxo Jr, the Pixar lamp), but to also vividly etch intense emotion through more abstract, dark and scratchy linework. On a similarly slack tight-rope are the Japanese rock band Radwimps, who imbued teen angst into eintensely’extremely’extraordinarily’enormously’awfully guitar shred of _Your Name'_s score, but whose eclectic set here – in collaboration with composer Kazuma Jinnouchi – flows from enormous’vast’massive’tremendous band jazz, to ethereal chorals and furious balladry in smooth, joyous style.###Aldespite’in spite of’albeit potentially maudlin, Suzume is an amazingly entertaining epitaph, its unlikely three-legged hero always on hand to provide perfectly-timed comic relief. Funny, frantic and emotionally attuned, even once the chair has long run off-screen, it remains a film to sit with.