As the school holidays are upon us, the releases to entice those younger ones to our cinema screens have begun. We expect Disney to drop a film and maybe another superhero franchise but now we have broader offers. This Japanese anime, that proved very popular in its native land SUZUME, is fighting for your money and doing it in a way that might just get you in. Charting the story of young Suzume, a schoolgirl with a casual manner and fun food stuffed lunch box. She has been living at the end of her school life and is sure and certain that the sense of fear about the way her and her friends lives are going, is not as bad as the news makes out. She is however, suddenly thrust into herodom. Japan is in danger. Its beautiful skies, pristine beaches and green vegetation has a terrible supernatural force after it. Emanating from a white, battered door. Now she is the only one who can see this. These supernatural forces that others cannot. That create earthquakes and destruction. The door is open and it’s up to her to close it before its starts spreading chaos across the land.

This is rather what you expect. If the Americans children and young persons offers are fixated on super people doing strange force like power things, than Japan and its close link to the supernatural is a the counter. Studio Ghibli (I am not a fan for a number of reasons) does this best and then there are myriad other bits from major studios like Toho, that deliver onto us more abstract but also more human fair. SUZUME is such a release. It has a well trodden story in its core but delivers it with some skill and a lot of style. The wonderful animation draws you in. Textured, glimmering and sometimes devastatingly drawn. This adds to the spirit of adventure. It might lack in narrative cohesion and the lead character might be the all good girl, with a good heart that feels less dimensional than I would want, but the whole film is actually quite fun.