A 17-year-old girl spends the film learning that staying still is a choice, not a curse, and that growing up means deciding what you're willing to carry. Shinkai shoots Japan like a country worth saving, frame by frame, and gives you a reason to believe her when she decides to save it. The doors are a metaphor that never stops being a door.

Suzume is a seventeen-year-old high school girl from a quiet town in Kyushu who crosses paths with a young man named Souta on his hunt for doors. When she follows him to ruins in the mountains, she finds a lone standing door and opens it, and a strange stone lying nearby turns into a cat-like creature when she picks it up. Soon doors are opening all over Japan, letting disaster through from the other side. To undo her mistake, Suzume joins Souta in locking them, a journey that becomes one of her own liberation and growth.