I'm thinking why Weathering With You is so incredibly offensive to me while Suzume works perfectly fine, despite the two of them sharing similar surrealism bit: that a natural disaster is caused by supernatural forces.
(spoilers abound btw!!)
Rather easy to see actually: the disaster in Weathering, climate change, is caused by human hands. It's avoidable. We know how it works. We can do something to solve it. It's difficult but solvable! So giving it a supernatural cause outside of our control is a slap to all the efforts we've put into it (or should start putting into it!)
The disaster in Suzume is earthquakes. We know how that works, but we can't stop it. It's just a thing that happens, it's just nature. Putting a supernatural layer on it isn't disrespecting anyone; instead, it's acknowledging our human limits.
But that doesn't mean we just sit and take it when it happens. There's an interesting contrast between Souta and Suzume; when Souta began to crystalize, he sits there and let it happen. Suzume instead break through it, she tries things, she didn't stop until she could make that attempt to save him.
Because even with earthquakes, there are things we can do. Set up alerts. Build more resilient structures. We don't just sit and take it, we try things.
But when a disaster hits, sometimes there's no two way around it. It hits, and afterwards we learn to live with what happened. What happened to Suzume's mom wasn't some supernatural occurrence, she simply died during the earthquake. Suzume learned to live with that.
A lot of the stuff in Suzume is a bit more fantasy handwavey than might usually be acceptable, but I feel this just fits into the theme. No one knows what's really going on! Why the doors appear, what the worm is. Everything is just straight up outside your control! But that's what natural disasters are like, huh. It's also what a lot of life is like. What matters is that we live with it.
And the talking cats! See, I find them interesting because our instinct is to apply human morality onto them. The cat is evil! The cat is a force for good! But the thing is, the cats are not human. They don't think like humans do, they're aliens. We don't know what they want, we can only guess how to appease/combat them from their behaviour, and isn't that what a lot of nature is like?
I like Suzume a lot. It's fun! It's funny! It's a road trip where Suzume gets extraordinarily lucky and met people who helped her on her journey (ah, isn't that also part of dealing with disasters, accepting help from strangers). I genuinely like the relationships, and glad it's not pushed too far forward.
Better than Your Name? Not, really, if you look at it overall? But I feel like this has a coherent messaging and a very very good follow up in general and I can imagine people to whom this is their favorite Makoto Shinkai film
