Maquia: Weaving Lives Together and Tearing Them Apart

b Maquia is a gorgeous fantasy film with beautiful music (from Kenji Kawai) and a story that feels different from any movie I've ever seen.  It's about family, parental bonds, and love of many kinds.  It's about jealousy, desire, and conflict on the individual and the national level.  I have seen it twice now, and I was glad the second time was at home because I cried just as much, if not more, the second time, and it was nice to have a sufficient stock of tissues and no one looking at me sideways wondering if I was okay. 

The writer and director Mari Okada also created O Maidens in Your Savage Season, a hilarious and painful teenage sex comedy series starring females, that deals with themes of desire and awkwardness among adolescents and Anohana, a magical realism / fantasy story that deals with themes of nostalgia, deep childhood tragedy, and growing up and growing apart.  Some of these themes also show up in this story of a Maquia, girl from a race of nearly ageless people cast adrift into the mortal world who chooses to save the life of a mortal infant and be his mother and thereby bind herself to the mortal world despite all the teachings of her people forbidding such encounters.  We get to watch her son grow against the backdrop of a changing world while she remains basically unchanged physically.  It's an emotional roller coaster

 

It's heartbreaking from beginning to end because any story of mortal and immortal on the same road  for a time is going to end the same way if there is any love involved.  And it's relatable to any parent, I suspect, because even though raising a child in the real world is not exactly this fraught, most parents know about the separation that happens as children grow up and become independent and make their own choices and go their own way.  Parents who have children who are adopted might find special a special connection to the rejection of the bond to the person who raised the child because they are not related by blood.  I fit in none of those categories, and I was fascinated and engaged by the situation and how it played out anyway.

 

If you like good fantasy with well-wrought worlds and enjoy making an emotional connection to the films you watch, you might really enjoy Maquia.  Make sure to have some tissues on hand.

April and the Extraordinary World

p This is another film I wanted to like more than I did.  It was visually interesting and creative and from a culture I'm less familiar with (France).  I just wasn't very fond of the main characters, and that is enough to make it hard for me to enjoy something I am watching for entertainment purposes.  There were plenty of adventures and twists and turns and things I did NOT see coming, so it wasn't a waste of time; I just likely won't be watching it again, and that's fine.  I have quite a large collection, so it's not bad that everything I try doesn't end up a permanent part of it.

In This Corner of the World

o I really wanted to like this movie more than I actually did.  It was a good and worthwhile film to see, a beautiful series of portraits, and I definitely cried and reacted in the right places.  It was long and sad and exhausting (like the times it was evoking), but I suspect I will like the graphic novel it was based on more because the episodic nature of the narrative tends to work better for me in that format. 

War is always tragic and filled with senselessness for everyone involved, no matter what corner of the world they're in, and my sense of that truth was palpable by the end of this film.  And still we go on, sometimes finding beauty where we don't expect it.