My Thoughts on Maquia: When The Promised Flower Blooms
I don't normally get this emotionally invested in an anime movies. There are a lot of anime movies that I like, but this one enthralled me from start to finish. It's about a race of people called the lorph, a mystical, long lived race known for extreme longevity, ethereal beauty, long, blond hair, and the ability to weave stories into special cloth called Hibiol. At the start of the movie they're attacked by a nearby kingdom and several of their women are captured. One of them is Lailia. They want her to basically just breed her and create offspring that have the lorph's longevity, because lorph live much longer than nomral humans. Another one of the women captured is Maquia, the namesake of the movie, but she somehow gets away and is raised somehwere else in much more peace. Lailia and Maque were close friends who don't see each other again for a very long time. I'm not sure if I'm dumb or if this is a common problem, but for like an hour and a half of the movie, maybe a little bit longer, I thought that Maquia was Lailia's daughter and that they were separated when Maquia was born. Instead a girl named Medmel. They both lived in the same castle though, so I don't get why they weren't able to see each other, that's probably a detail that I missed. Didn't harm my overall enjoyment of the movie, though. Meanwile Maquia adopts a son from a dying mother, which she names Ariel.
The heart of this movie is Maqua's relationship with her son, and to a lesser extent her distant relationship with her friend Lailia. It frequently goes back and forth between following Maqiua and following Lailia, and it is absolutely tragic. The writing makes it incredibly easy to sympathize with all of the main characters. Not the villains. In fact most of the villains are hilariously cartoonishly evil. That's not a huge complaint because it is only a movie so there's a limited amount of time for characterizaiton, which means they would obviously need to focus on the absolutely most important aspects to make the story work. The ending was also bittersweet. Not super happy, but not as sad as the rest of the movie either. It ended many decades after the final confrontation, after Maquia and her mother Laila fly away on a dragon. There's a timeskip where Maquia visits her son Ariel again after a very long time, and he's on his deathbed. They aren't biologically related so he will die much sooner than her. He lived a fulfilled life, despite almost dying on the battlefield in an earlier scene as a soldier, he not only has an adult daughter and a very young granddaughter. I honestly can't think of another way the movie could have ended. Having a perfectly happy ending would have seemed out of place, but having an ending just as dark and tragic as the rest of the movie might have been too much honestly. It's a perfect middle ground. It's sad that Ariel is about to die and barely recognized his mom, but it's happy that he lived a great life after all of the tragedy and had a family, and also got to reunite with his mother one last time.
This is a movie about motherhood and the lengths that many mothers would go to protect their children, and it's executed in a unique enough and engaging enough way to make it stand out. Whether it's Maquia sacrificing so much to protect her adoptive son Ariel, even dying her hair brown and abandoning her previous identity as a lorph to do so because of the discrimination faced against them, (proven even more by the fact that she dyed it back to blond again when Ariel left home), and working her butt off at a way too young age at a restuarant so she could support him, or Lailia being mentally tortured by the fact that she can't see her own daughter, (and they don't even learn who the other is until towards the end of the movie), and constantly begging to see her at various points of the film. It really was an incredibly executed, heartfelt, and tragic story.
The heart of this movie is Maqua's relationship with her son, and to a lesser extent her distant relationship with her friend Lailia. It frequently goes back and forth between following Maqiua and following Lailia, and it is absolutely tragic. The writing makes it incredibly easy to sympathize with all of the main characters. Not the villains. In fact most of the villains are hilariously cartoonishly evil. That's not a huge complaint because it is only a movie so there's a limited amount of time for characterizaiton, which means they would obviously need to focus on the absolutely most important aspects to make the story work. The ending was also bittersweet. Not super happy, but not as sad as the rest of the movie either. It ended many decades after the final confrontation, after Maquia and her mother Laila fly away on a dragon. There's a timeskip where Maquia visits her son Ariel again after a very long time, and he's on his deathbed. They aren't biologically related so he will die much sooner than her. He lived a fulfilled life, despite almost dying on the battlefield in an earlier scene as a soldier, he not only has an adult daughter and a very young granddaughter. I honestly can't think of another way the movie could have ended. Having a perfectly happy ending would have seemed out of place, but having an ending just as dark and tragic as the rest of the movie might have been too much honestly. It's a perfect middle ground. It's sad that Ariel is about to die and barely recognized his mom, but it's happy that he lived a great life after all of the tragedy and had a family, and also got to reunite with his mother one last time.
This is a movie about motherhood and the lengths that many mothers would go to protect their children, and it's executed in a unique enough and engaging enough way to make it stand out. Whether it's Maquia sacrificing so much to protect her adoptive son Ariel, even dying her hair brown and abandoning her previous identity as a lorph to do so because of the discrimination faced against them, (proven even more by the fact that she dyed it back to blond again when Ariel left home), and working her butt off at a way too young age at a restuarant so she could support him, or Lailia being mentally tortured by the fact that she can't see her own daughter, (and they don't even learn who the other is until towards the end of the movie), and constantly begging to see her at various points of the film. It really was an incredibly executed, heartfelt, and tragic story.
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