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MAQUIA WHEN THE PROMISED FLOWER BLOOMS LAST SCENE MOVIE
Indeed, the principal means by which the characters interact throughout the movie is by exclaiming their feelings between sobs, whether happy or sad. Sometimes, thinking about past times that she’s cried, she cries all over again. She cries when Ariel runs away and she cries when she gets him back, she cries when they fight and she cries when they make up. For all of her purported emotional strength, Maquia scarcely makes it through a single scene without breaking down in tears about something. Okada’s scripts are notorious for being stories where the characters cry a lot and you cry with them, but here that impulse towards catharsis verges on self-parody. The arbitrariness of the world of Maquia also serves to compromise much of the characterization of the people living in it. Once Maquia, Ariel, and Maquia’s childhood friend Leilia have made their critical choices, the war ends as quickly and neatly as a sporting match, with the losers sitting quietly in timeout. Similarly, albeit less understandably, a massive war erupts in the third act, but its actual consequences in the plot are merely to prompt some characters to action and clear a few others from the stage. After leaving the theater, I speculated with a friend that Odaka’s fascination with the operation of a foot-treadle floor loom may have been the initial seed for what became Maquia, but that it clearly got buried under everything else as the project took root and started to grow, as seeds tend to do. The dialogue of Maquia and her fellow survivors is sprinkled with analogies to cloth and weaving, but that’s the extent to which the unique lifestyle of the Iorph affects the plot of the movie. For instance, much is made of how the Iorph are a society devoted utterly to weaving, to the point that they record all of their words, deeds, and memories in the warp and weft of the textiles that they produce, but there’s no real payoff there.
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No, there are other confounding factors at work that seriously detract from the emotional core of the movie. I’m not even talking about the unspecificity of detail that Western-style fantasy settings often exhibit in anime, a shortcoming that Maquia manifests most clearly in the cookie-cutter politics and word-salad culture of the kingdom of Mezarte where it takes place. Of course, the decision to situate such a story as otherworldly, in order to make its premise a plausible one, also has its downsides. Krim, Maquia, and Leilia carry newly woven cloth in Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms Sure, it’s a parallel that’s only articulated once in passing, by the remorseful military commander who is directly responsible for the destruction of Maquia’s people, but it’s still a nice moment of resonance between Maquia’s story and the story of the otherworldly place in which she lives. This structure is even reflected in the setting of the movie itself, where the Iorph and Renato (read: elves and dragons) are dying out and yet life goes on, without their mystique and grandeur. The concept of how painful it would be to watch a loved one grow old and die, while time stands still for you, has existed in popular culture since Arwen and Aragorn in Lord of the Rings (and in culture at large since Eos and Tithonus), but Maquia is perhaps the fullest exploration of that theme that I’ve ever seen, mostly because it focuses so closely on Maquia’s experience as Ariel, her adoptive son, ages physically and emotionally, eventually surpassing her and leaving her behind. We follow one of their number, the titular Maquia, as she lives out the many years of her life in hiding, the self-appointed caretaker of an orphaned infant whom she found in her travels. A king’s greed scatters a peaceful race of immortal weavers called the Iorph to the four winds. In a way, it is comforting to know that the opportunity to make a feature-length film like 2018’s Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms did not change its writer and director, veteran scriptwriter Okada Mari, in the slightest.Īs it is with many of Okada’s more fantastical scripts, like Fractale and Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans, the premise is the strongest part of Maquia.