Trivia / Suzume

• All-Star Cast: On both sides.
  • The Japanese cast includes Nanoka Hara, Hokuto Matsumura, Eri Fukatsu, Shota Sometani, Kana Hanazawa, and Ryunosuke Kamiki.
  • The English dub features (in addition to the celebrity actors listed below) Josh Keaton, Roger Craig Smith, Amanda Céline Miller, Cam Clarke, Joe Zieja, Mela Lee and Allegra Clark.
• Celebrity Voice Actor: In the English dub, Suzume is voiced by Nichole Sakura (Cheyenne from Superstore) and Chika is voiced by Rosalie Chiang (Mei from Turning Red).
• Crossdressing Voices: Daijin is voiced by Ann Yamane in the Japanese dub and Lena Josephine Marano in the English dub.
• Dueling Works:
  • In France, this is to the animated film Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, which adapted Haruki Murakami's short story Super-Frog Saves Tokyo.
  • In the United States, where it was released in early 2023, this is to Studio Ghibli's The Boy and the Heron, a fantastical anime film that dealt with the protagonist's loss of their mother and their aunt acting as a replacement.
• DVD Commentary: First time, by director Makoto Shinkai and assistant director Yoko Miki. Included on the japanese Blu ray and DVD.
• Executive Meddling: Shinkai had intended on the story to center around a sapphic romance, but the producer shot him down.
• Production Posse: Shinkai once again reunites with RADWIMPS and Kana Hanazawa.
• Promoted Fangirl: Suzume's actress, Nanoka Hara has stated she's a huge fan of Shinkai's films, having started watching them when she was in middle school.
• Truth in Television: While the characters themselves are fictional, Suzume's backstory is centered on a real-life event. Based on the date in her diary and a line of dialogue about how her mom died 12 years ago, it's clear that her mom died in the 2011 earthquake/tsunami, which killed nearly 20,000 people in Japan alone.
• What Could Have Been:
  • According to Shinkai, Suzume was initially pitched as a road story centered around two women. However, his producer shot this down and persuaded him to make the film to be a straight romance in line with his previous films, citing that it was "too early" for there to be a theatrical anime film centered around what could have become a sapphic romance in the Japanese market.
    • Arguably, traces of this can be seen in the final product. After closing the school Gate, Suzume stays with Chika overnight. At this point in the film Suzume's feelings for Souta have not yet been established as romantic, and both Suzume and Chika mention how dating boys isn't any fun. Chika even references kissing, without specifying the gender being kissed. There's also a plot point where Suzume's aunt keeps warning her against spending time with strange men, and Suzume says she isn't with a man. In the final product this is simply a lie, but it's easy to imagine an earlier version of the script where she was relying on an Exact Words excuse, since her traveling companion (and love interest) was a woman in that version.
  • Shinkai himself felt he had done almost everything with romantic themes in his previous films and decided to downplay it by making Suzume's companion non-human. Before settling on making a chair the companion, he toyed with idea of having a companion who turned into a monster or an inanimate object such as a milk carton.