My local cinema is the best. Cinema ticket prices have shot up in this country sadly, with the regular price of a seat being approximately £10 (around $15-18), but when anime movies come, I just don’t care about the price…and I certainly was not bothered when it came to this much-hyped debut film by Mari Okada.
I tell you who is also the best: the UK-based anime distributor Anime Limited. They are single-handedly responsible for bringing the more recent quality anime movies to the UK and Ireland; your name, A Silent Voice, Sword Art Online: Ordinal Scale, Fireworks…and now Maquia and the fact that we Brits get a headstart before the US and Canada is a bit of a morale boost for the anime community here, who has had a long history of feeling rather neglected, especially when it comes to special guests coming to UK conventions. I surely hope that the UK anime scene gets more recognition by the rest of the world soon. But enough of that and let’s move on to the story.
The Iorph are a tribe of people living in a remote part of the world. They keep to themselves, weaving fabric that, they believe, tells stories, or Hibiol as they call it, but they keep to themselves for one reason: they have near-immortal lifespans. When the neighboring country of Mezar invades wanting the secret to immortality for themselves, the tribe scatter, with young girl Maquia waking up in the outside world…a world she has never known. After wandering for days in a forest, she finds an abandoned newborn baby. Stuck between feeling that she can’t interfere with the outside world and not wanting to be alone anymore, she decides to take the baby and raise him all by herself. Being in a country where the Iorph are highly sought after for their immortality, she and the boy, who she names Ariel, have to be constantly on the move, avoiding suspicious eyes and the royal guard.
As he grows into an adolescent, and not fully understanding how Maquia is unable to age, Ariel begins to distance himself away from her. How can the person who raised me look much younger than me, he thinks. We see both him wrestle with the idea of having a mother figure who is now suddenly younger-looking than he is, and her wrestle with the idea that she will eventually have to say goodbye to him. Just as the Elder in her tribe said to Maquia before she left, people who leave the tribe cannot fall in love, and said like some cardinal rule, we (along with Maquia) eventually realise why this rule is so important. As someone who already felt alone in her tribe, Maquia looks for companionship that is, realistically, only temporary for someone as ageless as her.
I won’t spoil too much, as those in the US and Canada won’t get to see this movie until late July. The world it tries to build (an immortal tribe of isolationists, greedy warmongering kingdoms, castles powered by water, tamed battle dragons) is not really that much different than that you would see in many other fantasy novels and stories, and you can certainly praise Mari Okada for her ambition. So what makes Maquia different? Its focus on motherhood instead of war and politics? Perhaps. But it’s not like it’s a subtle message…far from it. In fact, it’s something we are reminded of here in almost every scene.
I did enjoy the comparing of Iorph girls in the kingdom; while one gets to be with their child and receive love back, the other is taken away from the child they gave birth to and is unable to even see her, locked away like Rapunzel. There were times where I wanted to know more about that story instead of Maquia’s attempts to be a mother figure. Unfortunately, this message of motherhood over the years that it is trying to tell doesn’t really echo for all of us, and isn’t as intense as we would expect, despite it being as subtle as being hit by a truck. Time skips by and we see the young boy Ariel grow into a man, and the kingdom around them change dramatically, and yet Maquia herself doesn’t really change much at all. She constantly doubts herself on whether she should have the right to raise a child, knowing that she is capable of living forever. We see the fear she has knowing that, one day, Ariel will be gone and she will remain. But aside from this, Maquia’s overbearing focus on motherhood in an ever-changing world gets a little tiresome.
Don’t get me wrong, Maquia is a beautiful movie to watch, and the director should most definitely be applauded for her ambition and the world-building she has accomplished here, but I am a little concerned that its lack of subtlety has made it a little too melodramatic for some. Had its message been much more subtler and effortlessly woven into the story like the Hibiol fabric we regularly see, then Maquia would have been quite the triumphant movie to watch.
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Maquia: When The Promised Flower Blooms was released in Japan on February. 24. Its Western premiere was at the Glasgow Film Festival in Scotland on March. 04, and was shown in selected cinemas around the UK in the weeks after. It released in Australia and New Zealand on June. 07. It returned to UK cinemas on June. 27. It will be released in the US and Canada on July. 20.