by Jake Bourgeois, Contributing Writer
Netflix is back with another intriguing anime entry. So, I figured, “Why not?” and decided to give it a shot.
Maboroshi tells the story of a town frozen in time after an explosion. Caught in an ageless loop, teenagers, Masamune (Junya Enoki) and Atsumi (Reina Ueda), bond over a connection formed with a feral child, (Misaki Kuno), as they, their friends, and the town at large struggle with life, love, and what it means to be essentially ageless.
The writer/director is Mari Okada, and I’m not familiar with any of her previous work, but the movie is produced in part by MAPPA studios, behind anime like Jujutsu Kaisen, Chainsaw Man, and the final season of Attack on Titan. Now, I didn’t know of their involvement until my post-watch research, but, even for an anime lightweight, I’ve heard of those. So, it really shouldn’t have been a surprise in hindsight, but this movie looks stunning. The animation is beautiful and shot quite cinematically, particularly when it comes to the use of reflections. I was particularly taken with Okada’s eye and, would be interested in at least checking out her other feature, Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms.
The script, unfortunately, is much more uneven. Though it takes a little while to get into it, I found the relationship between Masamune and Atsumi to be one that worked. Both are a bit reserved in their own ways, but the way they bond over their connection with who they would come to name Itsumi works, and I was bought into that part of the narrative by the time that things ended.
However, before we really get into that portion of the film, the overwhelming thought I had about what I was seeing was, “Everything about this movie is weird.” The relationship between the friend group and the rest of the class is weird. We start the film on Masamune and his friends, and get them a good chunk for the first 15 minutes or so, where their talk of hormones and crushes comes off as odd, if not at least a little realistic. However, when we go back to the friend group and the rest of the classmates, it’s not done frequently enough to give the investment I need for some of the more emotional moments with that group to work like the movie wants it to.
What doesn’t help is how the movie is partially framed. We cut intermittently to Masamune working on an assignment about his future — ironic for students trapped in an ageless time — and while I can see its point by the end of the movie, what it ends up doing in the interim is break up the narrative a little awkwardly. Periodically cutting to the assignment ruins the flow and pacing of the movie, because I went from following what the movie wanted me to think about to being confused at the point of this recurring narrative device.
When there’s a mystery, weird isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Weird can mean intrigue and something to discover what’s at the heart of things. Hell, the movie hooked me with its premise. There’s a natural inclination to want to discover. Here, weird is just off-putting. Early on, it’s hard to get a real sense of time and its passage. For example, in Palm Springs, though there’s no explicit word on how long things have been going on, the audience is given context clues as things go along. Here, that clue works in reverse, as the audience is eventually clued in to how to arrive at the answer, but that comes after an hour or so of not knowing how to orient myself as far as the passage of time. When it comes to the actual resolution of the mystery, there’s talk of a “Sacred Machine” that I never really understood, and ideas that are debunked and disproven early. So by the time we’re given the actual answer to the mystery of the time stoppage, I’d already lost my investment in trying to figure out what was actually going on.
In the end, I found myself in a similar, frustrating position when it comes to another anime project. Despite an intriguing fantastical premise and strong visuals, I was let down by a story that loses its focus too often, and when it finally delivers on its resolution, I was underwhelmed.
Rating: It Was Just Okay
Maboroshi is currently streaming on Netflix
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