Sayonara no Asa ni Yakusoku no Hana o Kazarō (Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms)

Director: Mari Okada
Release date: February 24, 2018
Rating: ★★★
Review:

The Japanese animation industry apparently is so rich that new interesting films can pop up seemingly out of nowhere. For example, ‘Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms’ (from now on ‘Maquia’) is made by the P.A. Works studio, which since its founding in 2000 focused on television series, and which only made four feature films, the first being based on a video game, the second made for television, the third for training purposes, and the fourth based on a television series.

So, their fifth feature film to be a completely original story, not based on a video game, television series or even a manga, comes as a surprise. It seems that ‘Maquia’ was the pet project by its director Mari Okada, who wrote the story herself. Okada, apparently is somewhat of a modern legend as she has written for over fifty television series since 2001, and is called by Wikipedia “one of the most prolific writers currently working in the anime industry”. She’s one of the brains behind ‘Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day’ (2011), one of only two anime television series I have watched, and it comes to no surprise to me that the ‘Maquia’s’ story style has something in common with that series. Both series and film have a strong focus on human drama, with emotions reigning uncontrolled, and tears flowing frequently. In fact, despite the high fantasy setting, ‘Maquia’ has a strong element of melodrama, and the rather forced emotions, so different from the more restrained style in studio Ghibli, or the films by Yasujirō Ozu for that matter, actually made it harder for me to relate with these people.

‘Maquia’ is a fantasy film, set in a rather Middle Earth-like world, and starts with the depiction of a society of near-immortals called Lorphs, whose surroundings are particularly like the depictions of elven kingdoms in Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. These Lorphs write their memories by weaving cloths and live far away from more mortal men. One of these, a young girl called Maquia (from which the English film title takes its name) rather out of nowhere complaints she is so alone. Shortly after this scene of distress the eternal city is attacked by an army of men, and Maquia soon finds herself in the outside world, where she adopts a baby, whose mother is killed.

From then on, the film takes an episodic nature, showing us various stages of the mother-son relationship until the son, whom Maquia calls Ariel, has matured, while his mother, in contrast, has retained the same teen appearance she had in the beginning.

The film apparently tries to say something about how to love is to lose and to let go, how to find beauty in the short lives we have, and how relationships form the most important part of life, but the film’s messages get deluded in a rather complex story, in which we do not only follow Maquia, but also her childhood friend Leilia, who is forced to become a queen by her abductors, the captain who destroyed the Lorph city in the first place and one Lang, a boy/man with whom Maquia spent her first years in the mortal world. The bigger story, and all its subplots are far less interesting than Maquia’s relationship to her adopted son, and both prolong and distract the film unnecessarily.

Apart from being unfocused and very, very emotional, ‘Maquia’ is also hampered by an overblown score by Kenji Kawai, all too forcefully guiding the viewer in which emotion to feel. Even worse, are the rather lazy and utterly generic human designs, which nowhere transcend your average anime television series. The animation, too, is fair, but not outstanding. There’s also a small dose of computer animation that is used sparingly and effectively. No, the film’s highlights are not the story, music, character designs or the animation, but the background art and the lighting, which are both no less than magnificent, and which both give ‘Maquia’ a splendor that make the film a delight to watch, even when the characters and events themselves don’t.

I like ‘Maquia’ being an original story, and its theme of what it means to be (im)mortal is interesting, but the film is too long, too episodic, too meandering and too dramatic to entertain, and I am pretty sure in the end I will not remember either the film’s story or its characters, but the beautiful background art and superb lighting, which the make the film a standout, after all.

Watch the trailer for ‘Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms’ yourself and tell me what you think: