July 19, 2024

Contemporary fantasy with lots of dialects

Grammareasy╞═════▰════╡ advanced
Vocabularycommon¹╞═▰════════╡ rare
Prosedialogue╞▰═════════╡ voice-over exposition
Languagestandard╞════════▰═╡ non-standard
Contentgeneral╞▰═════════╡ specialized

I loved this movie but if I have to explain the story, it will sound very weird so bear with me. The story follows a high school girl who goes on an impromptu trip throughout many different regions of Japan, accompanied by a walking talking chair — yeah I know — in the search of a mischievous white little cat who unleashes giant monsters onto the world by opening Narnia-style doors that must be closed.

I don't know how the authors came up with this but the execution is fantastic. The visuals are absolutely beautiful, the music is marvelous, the dynamics between the characters are so great and there is just the right amount of action to keep you hooked.

The quality of the visual art in すずめの戸締まり is comparable to that of 君の名は and 言の葉の庭, so if you liked those, you'll probably like this too.

That said, my favorite point by far was the way people talked and the wide diversity of very noticeable dialects. There is Tamaki Iwato with her endearing Miyazaki-ben that is somewhat strong but still sounds like Japanese. Then, we have a little detour by 四国 where Suzume meets Chika, an adorable and very welcoming 愛媛人 full of energy before being picked up by an おばさん from 神戸 when hitch-hiking. Expect to come across the dialects of 九州、四国、関西, and 関東. However, the majority of the dialogue lines are 標準語 so it is not like ジョゼと虎と魚たち where it is 100% dialect from start to finish.

Nonetheless, I've learned so much new 九州方言 in this one movie, it is crazy. It took me one extra hour on top of an already rather long 2h movie to research all those dialectical quirks that do not show up in any of my Yomitan dictionaries.

If learning more about the many different Japanese dialects interests you, ぜひご覧ください.

¹ : The vocabulary is all rather common if we make abstraction of the dialects. While I was watching the movie, there were only two or three words like 廃墟 and ミミズ that were truly novel words. The rest is rather dialectal variations of (very) common vocab like どうして becoming なして.

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