MAQUIA: WHEN THE PROMISED FLOWER BLOOMS
Growing pains
released 27 June 15 | 115 minutes Director Mari Okada Cast Manaka Iwami, Miyu Irino, ai Kayano, yuki Kaji
This anime from writer/ director Mari Okada is very much a female-centric story. Many fantasies envisage worlds shared between ordinary humans and races with far longer lifespans. Okada asks what would happen if a woman who can expect to live for centuries adopted a human baby as her child.
In Maquia’s world, women like herself are hunted commodities; her clan is raided by soldiers hoping to use its offspring to shore up their kingdom. Maquia – a shy recluse who looks little more than a child – isn’t captured herself, but ends up wandering the human world, where she discovers a baby boy who has been orphaned by violence. The adoptive mother and son gain a surrogate human family for a time, but they must move on eventually. As the boy reaches adolescence while his parent doesn’t age, tensions grow between them. (Okada also wrote anime A Lull In The Sea, which has comparable conundrums about characters ageing differently.)
The splendid backgrounds, including a city that’s one huge industrial satanic mill, outshine the less impressive character designs and animation. The last act has multiple well-timed coincidences and a climactic fake-out which feels rather cheap. But much of the story is highly engaging, not overstating its strong central themes: the resilience of mothers, and the lurking Oedipal ambivalence between the story’s two leads as they struggle to understand both their relationship and themselves. Andrew Osmond
Director Mari Okada’s autobiography, From Truant To Anime Screenwriter, was recently published in English, as an ebook.