Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 19 · 9:35pm Oct 19th, 2021
Finished watching several new things in the last couple weeks! Well, not all of them are that new. New to me, anyway. Featured items this week are Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms and Plastic Memories, after the break.
Maquia is just an all-around great movie. Not that I don't have some nitpicks with it, but most of those would take spoilers to talk about. It's also a series rich in lore, which is the kind of thing I could ramble about forever, so I'll try to control myself. This is also going to be an issue for another series I'm watching, though nowhere close to completing.
We start with main character Maquia (pronounced like MOCK-ee-ah) on the secluded island where she lives. Everyone there is blond with blue eyes, and it's honestly hard to tell most of them apart, even the boys from the girls. The whole place is structured around producing a valuable kind of cloth called Hibiol that they export. It can be used for anything normal cloth is used for, though it's especially for weaving color patterns into it that record chronicles of people's lives or historical events. Most people do the planting and gathering of materials needed to make the thread and dyes. Only Maquia and her mentor weave the cloth, and they live alone in the island's massive central tower. She's happy enough, and she's got a good friend Leilia. The weavers and the rest are technically slightly different; legend holds that the rest once had the ability to fly, but it's been so long that nobody remembers if that was even true. They're all very long-lived as well. Maquia is fifteen, which is the point where their aging dramatically slows. Her mentor, for example, looks like she's in her mid thirties or so, whereas she's actually about three or four hundred. Because of this, she warns Maquia against loving any outsiders, since it will only lead to her feeling alone. The mentor is also the town elder, though I don't know whether the two positions always go hand in hand.
We've seen a ton of immortality angst stories in this fandom, and that's the perfect setup for one. I was ready for something maudlin. And I was pleased with what the story did. It's a pretty complex plot, and only part of it deals with her outliving any outsiders she might care for. In an even more refreshing turn of events, romantic love is never even part of that. It only comes up once, and Maquia instantly dismisses the possibility. I thought that was a great decision. But why would Maquia even have any dealings with outsiders? Only a few traders come to the island, and they don't interact directly with the weavers.
Well, a nearby kingdom sends a raiding party of knights riding dragon-like creatures for reasons that don't get revealed until later. Maquia's outside the village when it occurs, so she doesn't see that the townspeople have gathered and her mentor is challenging the knights. She instead runs to the tower thinking to find her mentor there, but one of the dragons sees her and gives chase, busting its way in after her. It then suddenly has its eyes turn red, and its skin starts erupting fire. Why this happens is another subplot related to why the soldiers are there, which I won't spoil. But as the dragon becomes uncontrolled and takes off, it gets tangled in all the hanging cloth and ends up dragging Maquia along with it.
When it finally crashes and explodes in a forest, leaving Maquia across the sea from her home with no way to get back any time soon, she starts looking for shelter. She soon comes upon a country house with the sound of a baby crying, but nobody answers the door, so she goes in... and finds a dead woman with a sword stuck in her back from some bandit raid, clutching the baby. There's also a man standing there, but after a tense few seconds, Maquia recognizes him as one of the traders who sometimes deals in their cloth. He happened upon the scene the same as her, and he laments the baby's fate, but whaddya gonna do, he says. Maquia won't stand for that. She knows nothing about motherhood, but she immediately takes charge of the baby. By morning, she's wandered to another farm and is found crying in the barn because she can't figure out how to get the baby to suckle from a nanny goat.
Thus starts the movie's real theme: motherhood. It's a fascinating look at many different aspects of it. You have Maquia, who was orphaned, though it seems like in the ritual of her people, she was born into the role of weaver and would have been taken from her mother for that purpose anyway. Her mentor is nice to her, but no mother figure. Maquia has never known a mother. But then she takes on the role of mother for this baby. The farm where she ended up is owned by a lady raising two children alone, so the last thing she needs is two more. But Maquia can earn a good living as a weaver, so that helps. This lady is yet another facet of motherhood. When we encounter Maquia's friend Leilia later in the movie, she doesn't want to leave her situation because she's pregnant and has hope for the future, but once she does have her daughter, the two are never allowed to see each other. Finally, when Maquia's adopted son gets older, he starts a family of his own. It's all a great piece of compare and contrast.
After Maquia comes to live on the farm, the movie starts doing occasional time skips, which is disorienting, since Maquia is the first one you see each time, and she no longer looks older as she ages. It's not until other characters walk in and someone calls them by name that you realize some significant time has elapsed. The plotting is very tight, and it's interesting to see which characters who had been introduced earlier get woven back in. She leaves for the city to try tracking down Leilia, taking her son Ariel with her, at a point when he looks to be about five. Keep in mind this is the city that raided her home, so she has no particular love for the place, and neither would Ariel or the farm family who learned of her ordeal. It can be easy to lose track of that as she settles into the city and you consider people's loyalties. At first, people there can take Ariel as her son, though quietly thinking it's a shame she's a mother at so young an age, but as he gradually looks older and she doesn't, it's cool to see the different tales they come up with or assumptions people make.
The kingdom is weakening, however, and this could be an opportunity. Surely Maquia is not the only one of her people left, and the rest would want some revenge. The back half of the movie covers all the political intrigue and the battles that result, but through it all is just this wonderful tale of motherhood. The characters were all well drawn, the art great, the music good (I particularly liked the closing theme). My only complaints about the plot were that the ending felt kind of rushed on several fronts. Leilia behaves in a way that makes me think she must have gone a little mad, and I just don't buy her actions. And Maquia's fate leaves a lot of things open-ended, though I do think it tends to imply her original home had never been that damaged and things have returned to going well there. And then there is a sweet epilogue.
Rating: excellent.
Sayonara no Asa ni Yakusoku no Hana o Kazaro (translates closer to "Let's Hold the Promised Flowers in the Morning of Farewells"), movie, relevant genres: drama, fantasy, coming of age.
A friend recommended Plastic Memories to me, and I forget what prompted it. Some discussion about the common anime topic of what it means to be human when androids are common. He'd heard this was a good one of the genre but hadn't seen it himself.
I'll warn you ahead of time: this one's a tear-jerker.
Yes, androids are common, and the company that makes the top of the line ones called Giftia has customer service teams. Now, it's pretty standard to have to just hand-wave some stuff for a given premise, and a few things about how these androids work and what the business model for them is don't quite add up. So you just have to accept that. Giftia have a specific lifespan, some exact number of hours that comes out to nine years and change. When an android's life is up, it has to be shut down. If it's not, then within another hour, it will lose its memory, quit responding to anyone, and may turn violent. These androids can be bought for any use. One example is an old lady who has one to pose as her granddaughter and help her up the stairs or remind her to take her medication. Another interesting one is a yakuza boss who wants a personal assistant/bodyguard. When it's within two weeks of an android's expiration date, a customer service team will be dispatched to ease them through the process, since some of them will have become undoubtedly very attached. A few even resist or try to run away, but that never ends well. Customers have a few options. They can be done with it and get their deposit back. They can get a discount on a new android. Or they can reuse the old one, if they want to keep the same appearance, but that means uploading a new personality into it. There's no way to preserve that or the memories.
These customer service teams always consist of a human and one of the company's own Giftia, and the first episode starts with a new human hire, Tsukasa, on his first day. He gets assigned a Giftia named Isla who had been partnerless for a while and put on desk duty, as her previous partner considered her too clumsy and didn't want to work with her anymore. As he goes on a few missions with Isla, Tsukasa comes to like her, but she's always fairly distant. Then he learns that she's been around a while, and her expiration date is coming up soon.
From there, a lot of the middle of the series takes on a slice of life feel. There are the usual misunderstandings. How he found out about her expiration, who thinks who else knows what pieces of information, bad assumptions about romance, and a lot of this is played for comedy. The series also leans on fan service a bit much, but on the tame side, mostly in the posing. But eventually Tsukasa does decide he's in love with Isla, even though he knows it can't last. And that's of course why she tries to keep everyone distant from her: she doesn't want them getting hurt.
The more serious part of the plot kicks back in during a thoughtful episode where another Giftia from a different district office comes over to help in a joint investigation, and one of Tsukasa's coworkers recognizes her as a neighbor who was a good friend when they were kids. Except this Giftia had expired in the meantime, had a new identity installed, and doesn't remember any of it. It serves as an interesting backdrop as the two try to reconnect in parallel to Tsukasa wanting to start a relationship with Isla. Meanwhile, Tsukasa is trying to find out if there actually is no way to preserve a Giftia's memories and identity, for obvious reasons.
Just as obviously, there are good reasons both for and against them pursuing this relationship if in fact she's effectively going to die soon, and various friends and coworkers weigh in. Mostly Isla's already made up her mind, even though her former partner makes what to me is the best argument for going ahead. People are going to miss you anyway. Nothing will change that. Why not let them give you some happiness while you can still experience it? Isla comes to her own conclusion, though, one that's rather thematic for the show.
There's a sweet conclusion, and an epilogue that's a little bit maddening in its open-endedness, though not about what you'd think. A lovely romance story, one that earns its emotional stripes, quality art, good enough music. It's my favorite of the android humanity stories I've seen.
Rating: very good.
13 episodes, relevant genres: drama, comedy, romance.
And the rest of this week's good to not-so-good:
Batman Ninja (movie)—this was just weird. It barely hangs together as a plot, and too much about it doesn't make much sense. Batman and a whole host of his friends and enemies get flung into feudal-era Japan and have to duke it out there so Batman can prevent damage to the timeline and get everyone back to where they belong. The CGI is pretty clunky, though the VAs were at least good. But so much of it is pointless. Like Batman somehow has his Bat Cycle nested inside his Batplane nested inside his Batmobile there, and he loses them all in the first battle, accomplishing nothing in the process. What was the point of even having them? They didn't do anything. Then there's a dumb "twist" of Joker losing his memory, and... yeah. This was just barely passable. Rating: meh, relevant genres: action, drama, historical.
Berserk (25 episodes)—a friend recommended this to me, and he's more into the manga scene than anime. He said the 1997 version of the anime was the best adaptation of it, so that's the one I watched. The problem is that the manga goes on for 30 volumes, and the author died not long ago, so... Well, the series was only ever meant to cover part of the story anyway, and if you come at it from the manga side, knowing what the overall plot looks like, I could see this being more enjoyable. For someone with no foreknowledge, it comes across more as something that has plot whiplash, taking a severe left turn right at the end only to resolve nothing. The story follows a tough guy named Gatsu who ends up joining a motley assortment of soldiers under the leadership of a charismatic man named Griffith. At first, they're just seemingly doing a Robin Hood kind of thing, but Griffith has high aspirations and gradually works his way up into his group being the premiere mercenary army around and being trusted to win several important battles. It could even lead to them becoming an elite force within the king's official army. Mostly, the plot deals with how Gatsu wants to see Griffith's dreams through, though being concurrently disillusioned about it since he's enabling someone else's dream and not pursuing his own. Once it seems Griffith has reached all the heights he can, Gatsu would prefer to go his own way. And that's where everything falls apart. It's kind of slow getting there, but once it does, things happen fast, to the point I didn't think they could possibly resolve it before the end. And they don't. Griffith's fall from grace prompts some serious supernatural happenings that are barely alluded to and given no importance early in the series, and again, unless you're grounded in why that's significant in the manga, it's just going to feel like it comes out of the blue only to go nowhere. Trigger warnings for some nudity, sexuality, and rape. Art quality is pretty good for its era, VAs are good, music ranges from great to bad. Rating: decent, relevant genres: action, fantasy, dark.
Magical Girl Site (Maho Shojo Saito, 12 episodes)—this has a setup that's a whole lot like Madoka Magica (which I haven't seen, but plan to, though I already know what happens in it). Girls who have endured serious misfortune are conveniently let on to some urban legend that you can go to a website and gain a power to seek revenge. So it's got a note of Hell Girl in there, too. Really, I liked the concept to this a lot more than the execution. It goes so over the top on things that it feels like the emotions are strained and more artificial. Main character Aya is being ruthlessly bullied at school by a trio of girls for what is later revealed to be a stupid reason. They vandalize her desk and locker, punch and kick her in the bathroom, dunk her head in the toilet when they're on cleaning duty together. They even go so far as to arrange for an upperclassman to sexually assault her (though one of the girls talks the ringleader down from cutting Aya with a knife because that is somehow going too far in comparison to rape). She even doesn't get a respite at home, as her parents are pretty standard toward her but put immense academic pressure on her older brother, who lets off steam by beating the shit out of Aya regularly. You couldn't make more of a sad sack character out of her, which detracts from the authenticity of the emotions. It is a departure from the standard magical girl plot, though, as there are no enemy forces to fight. The powers are just to get revenge and... do whatever else you like with them, I guess, but the wands that give each a unique power are transferrable, and there's a rogue girl going around trying to kill the others and amass their wands. I will say that the plot is pretty tight, and each new character introduced often has unexpected connections to one or more of the existing ones. Then they find out there's something nefarious going on behind it all and team up to find out why this magical girl stuff exists in the first place. By the end, they do take out several high-ranking bad guys, but not the main one, and it's just left open-ended from there. Trigger warnings for sexual content and attempted rape. Rating: good, but on the low end of that, relevant genres: fantasy, action, thriller, dark.
Pokemon (who knows how many episodes and incarnations)—no need to summarize anything. I'll just say that I watched a couple of the earliest seasons when it was new on Saturday morning cartoons but then got bored with it. Rating: meh, relevant genres: action, games/sports, comedy.
Pop Team Epic (Poputepipikku, 12 episodes + 2 specials)—this is a skit comedy series with a bunch of quick-hit scenes mostly involving two overpowered girls deliberately drawn in a low-quality fashion. It's about as random as random comedy can get, and it was really hit or miss with me whether I found it funny. A lot of the humor is relatively inside jokes from Japanese culture, so a fair amount of it just went over my head. I'm not really the audience for this. Rating: huh?, relevant genres: comedy, random.
Psychic Wars (movie)—this is a pretty old movie, and I barely remember anything about it. Some doctor learns of a prophecy that he will defeat a demon invasion from the past, and various spirits aid him on his quest, even helping him travel in time to fight them at their source. When he returns, he is warned that a few still remain, including the queen, and there's a bit of a twist as to how he has to fight her, but it's all a bit cliched. Rating: decent, relevant genres: action, fantasy, dark.
Seen any of these? Did I convince you to try any of them? I'd like to hear about it in the comments.
Last 10:
vol. 9 here
vol. 10 here
vol. 11 here
vol. 12 here
vol. 13 here
vol. 14 here
vol. 15 here
vol. 16 here
vol. 17 here
vol. 18 here
Definitely interested in the first two now! :)
Maquia is one of my all time favorite films, one of a mere handful to make me openly weep. Most of what Mari Okada writes is great, so if you're itching for more stories of that caliber, look her up.
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I probably will, as I have no reading material imminent. Were any more of them made into movies?
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Oh, you misunderstand, she writes for anime. I can't remember if you reviewed Anohana or Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans, but she wrote those shows, among many others. I believe the only manga she's done is O Maidens in Your Savage Season, which she then adapted into a show later anyway. It was pretty fun.
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I did review Anohana back in... volume 3, I think? It was a featured one, since I'd rated it very good. I think it was more over the top in places, but it did mostly seem emotionally earnest, and I liked it a lot. IBO is also one I reviewed, lumped in with all the other Gundam stuff, and it was the only one of those series I even slightly liked. O Maidens is one I have on my to-watch list.
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And looking down her filmography now. Bunch of these I've never heard of, but should read up on a bit to see if they grab my interest. Let's see...
Hamtaro—it was alright
Basilisk—have it on my to-watch list
Aria— The Natural—am about halfway through it and am deliberately watching it very slowly because I absolutely love this entire sequence of shows and don't want it to end.
Toradora!—loved it
Darker Than Black: Gemini of the Meteor—rather liked it
Anohana—loved it
Hanasaku Iroha—really liked it
Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron Blooded Orphans—was okay
O Maidens in Your Savage Season—on my to-watch list
A Whisker Away—really liked it
The Flowers of Evil—huh, she only worked on the live action version. I have the anime on my to-watch list.
I'd heard of 6 or so of her other ones that didn't grab my interest, but I'd been on the fence about Black Butler and Cinnamon. And maybe Sasami, since I was a fan of Tenchi Muyo, though it's a completely different genre.
lol I hate Plastic Memories so much. I watched the first two episodes at an Anime Club meeting like five years ago, and I thought it was the most emotionally manipulative, generic dreck
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Eh, the real plot doesn't kick in until about halfway through. And imo they do a good job of making the romance engaging. The first ep just introduces the conflict, and then the next 4 or 5 are mostly slice of life that don't even have much emotional content, unless you count the customers they're counseling. In that case, yes, it's on the shallow side, but you're never going to get enough context for those situations. I can't say I thought those were great episodes, but waiting for the other shoe to drop on Isla kept my interest going, and it paid off, at least for me.