OUT ON HER OWN
One of Japan’s favourite screenwriters turns director with a fantastic tale about immortality and motherhood
In an industry dominated by men, where the standard career path involves working your way up from doing storyboards and animation to directing, Mari Okada defies all the traditions. She came into anime as a writer, her work covering everything from AKB0048 – the series based on the insanely popular all-girl idol group – to the mecha action of Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans and the angsty supernatural romance Vampire Knight. Now Okada turns director with Maquia: When The Promised Flower Blooms, a beautiful fantasy adventure about an immortal woman, Maquia, raising a human child called Erial. “Everything was difficult,” says Okada about making the jump to directing. “I was used to writing screenplays by myself at home, whereas directing animation is a joint effort. When you’re the writer, you’re the only batsman, you write it then hand it over to the director and it’s out of your hands. It’s taken for granted that’s how it works, but it was a bit lonely.” Hinting at parallels with the director’s own experience, at the outset Okada’s heroine lives in an isolated community of storytellers who spend their lives weaving the history of the world into huge tapestries, before Maquia is plucked from her home and cast adrift in an unfamiliar land teetering on the brink of war. But the heart of the story is the changing relationship between Maquia and Erial as he ages while she remains eternally youthful. “In my original screenplays, I’ve often dealt with themes of time and relationships,” says Okada. “I think my strength as a writer going on to become a director is in the depiction of emotions, but within animation you have people who draw, people who do the animation, people who do storyboards, who do the voice acting, and even working from the same screenplay it’s hard to get everyone on the same page. I thought that as a director I would have control, to make sure people understood the emotions I was trying to convey, and I that I could go further with my themes of time and relationships. Although time is meant to be a leveller, everyone’s notion of it is different. An adult will experience a day differently to a child. I wanted to tell a story that used that gap between different people’s experiences of time and emotion while living at the same time.”
BLOSSOMING TALENT
Okada has built such a reputation as an anime screenwriter that just her name can attract fans to a project, even when she was writing for other directors. Prior to her debut feature, the president of the production company PA Works said he wanted to see “a 100% Okada anime”, but the director isn’t quite sure she’s achieved that yet. “It depends how you define 100% really,” she says. “It’s not 100% me, but it is 100% the film that I wanted to watch.”
Maquia: When The Promised Flower Blooms is in cinemas from 27 June.