This movie is a visual treat from beginning to end. Talking about this movie in this forum and others, I have advocated that if you are a fan of animation as an art form, then this movie is a must-watch.
The story of this movie didn’t connect with me very much, but speaking to others, it was very impactful to them. So, your engagement with the story seems to vary a lot from person to person.
I chose a clip of this road trip from the movie because this stretch of the movie was my absolute favorite. There are tons of great character moments that happen because these different characters with their own complexities are all jammed into one car together. This portion of the movie also has several moments in which the story slows down, lingering on scenes here and there. This is a nice contrast to most of the rest of the movie which is very tense and has lots of action (Suzume runs a lot, it must be nice to have that much stamina).
I had debated choosing a grand action sequence as a clip, but when I remember this movie, its this stretch of relative calm that I remember the most. A lot of the action sequences have pretty big story spoilers as well that I wanted to try to avoid.
When I go to pick out a clip from an episode or movie, I usually have some idea of what to make a clip of already and I just need to remember which episode/timestamps to use in all the ffmpeg commands. However, I had a hard time with this one. I ended up watching pretty much the whole movie from skipping around so much figuring out what to pick. This road trip segment is one that I kept coming back to.
My point in all that rambling is that the movie holds up imo. I thoroughly enjoyed diving back into this movie. I think a big part of the reason that I like this road trip portion of the movie is that this really marks the portion of the movie during which Suzume is acting with a purpose in mind. The whole first half of the movie is her and Souta reacting to events happening around them. However, after the mid-movie climax (trying to be spoiler-free for others), she has a goal driving her journey. She isn’t going to let a little thing like rain, another cat, a car crash, etc. stop her from reaching it.
Also, Serizawa is a total bro. The man throws everything aside, not having the faintest idea of what is going on, just because there is a chance he could help his bud.