Suzume review – breathless, operatic animation will shake you to the core

This hyperactive, urgent and emotionally-charged new film from Japanese animator Makoto Shinkai (best known for the colossal-grosser Your Name) is an attack on the senses in the best possible way; the first fifteen minutes alone are breathtaking in their ability to build adrenaline to genuinely euphoric ends, cementing what feels like the best opening to a film in years – animated or otherwise. It's an effect that Suzume almost carries through the entirety of its epic, two-hour runtime, save for what could be seen as a minor sag in its later third.

Suzume is the name of our protagonist, in many ways the typically accident-prone teen one tends to encounter in YA anime. One day she awakens to encounter a handsome stranger on her way to school: this is Sōta, who asks for directions to a nearby ruin and then disappears from view – but not Suzume's thoughts. Later, a storm begins to brew in the distance and huge, black tentacles fill the sky, threatening to consume the landscape. Suzume, plucky as ever, rightly traces the source to the ruins where she sent Sōta, and where the film's aforementioned – and sensationally operatic – opening takes place.

Sōta, it turns out, is a “closer,” whose job is to shut out invading forces hellbent on destroy the land. And so, of course, Suzume must learn to be a closer, too, the movie shapeshifting once as the usually stoic Sōta is cursed as a piece of walking-talking furniture (a visual gag that continually pays dividends), then again as it becomes an unexpected odd-couple road movie, made up of spectacular, stunningly-scored set-pieces that steer us from abandoned amusement parks to futuristic cityscapes. It's within these imaginative sequences that Shinkai – as always – displays his knack for blending traditional animation with the computer-generated; a distinct visual union that has always felt so intricately Japanese, in a culture that pays so much respect to its past while embracing the possibilities of the future.

That's to say, to watch Suzume is to be continually blown away by the sheer amount of work: Shinkai's intricate, painstakingly-realised compositions, packed with details both magical and realist; large-scale battle sequences and high-speed chases rival anything rendered with or without ink. Then there's Kazuma Jinnouchi's choral-inclined score, which repeatedly ignites goosebumps on the flesh. But Suzume is, as with the best of Japanese animation, also content to take time to appreciate the small things, too: steaming hot dishes of food, gentle interactions, shots of shimmering vistas and densely-packed metropolises that firmly place you in a world that appears to expand outside of its chosen frames.

Like Your Name before it, Suzume is about the unsteady passage of teen adolescence, but is also environmentally allegorical in nature. Direct lines of focus are drawn between the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, which killed close to 20,000 people, the film's relentless, chaotic forces standing in for the country's own unpredictable shifting plates. But Japan is an island long ravaged by its proximity to natural disaster – this is a moving work about a nation coming together in the wake of several insurmountable tragedies. Suzume beautifully, epically argues that moving forward is sometimes an act of remembering. It is a rush of pure creativity that leaves you breathless and hope-filled.

Suzume is released in UK cinemas on 14 April.