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Watching 'Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms' a Year Later, and Thinking About the Progression of Time as a Whole

This is a post on the internet. One about a film, and time.

By BoblobV2Published 5 years ago 5 min read
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At this point, it has been over a year since I watched Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms in the cinema; and since my initial review of the film, I have now written 85 posts on Vocal. To think that a year has passed since that post, which was the fifth post on Vocal I had done at the time, is a surreal feeling. I have since experimented on what I wanted to write about and have decided upon Anime and Films, as they are the two things in my life that I love more than most things. In fact, one could argue I need to spend less time invested in these two aspects of my life and take time to think about something else and spend time with actual people instead of fictional ones.

Maquia came out on home video last month, and I watched it again at home. Since then, I thought that I would simply be doing a simple "one year later" where I would be looking at the film and judging its merits a year later. However, seeing the film again, and now sitting down to write this piece, I am left with the realization of the enormity of the passage of time within my life, and the world around me. As such, seeing this film again a year later, knowing what happens from the perspective of the plot, I am left to embrace the fickle nature of time itself, as depicted in the film.

I am graduating in November. Despite that, it feels as if it was only last month that I was 22 and starting university. Watching Maquia, and marinating on the film as long as I have allowed me to look deeper into myself. Doing so, it hit me on my walk home from town one day. I am a quarter of a century old, there is a chance that if I were to live a full life, that I might be a third of the way through life already. Looking back at what I have achieved in this time, I am constantly hit by the existential dread of knowing that I have not achieved anything meaningful at all in my life yet. Added to that is the fear of looking forward to a life of complete unpredictability in an increasingly volatile world where it seems as if it would only take the smallest of sparks to set everything to a destructible playlist of pure chaos.

The uncertainty of the life ahead is only slightly mitigated by the small comfort that, at the end of the day, we all have the exact same destination, and it is only a matter of when we reach this destination. Time is something that I have been thinking about for the past year. Time is something that I have come to love. Time is something that I have come to fear. Time is something that I have come to hate. Time is something I am coming to understand as something increasingly relative. Time is uncaring. Time is nonchalant. Time is everlasting. Time is thus.

This is how time is depicted in the film, Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms. The feelings that I have listed above are all things I experience on a daily basis, and these are the same feelings I experienced when watching the film. Thinking back to the films, and anime that I love, they usually revolve around the concept of experiencing time. So much so that the film that my group and myself submitted as our final film in university is inspired by the concept of time. Over the past couple of years alone, A Ghost Story, The Night Is Short Walk on Girl, Garden of Words, Mirai, A Silent Voice, and 5 Centimeters per Second, all left a deep impact within me. Garden of Words, in particular, which I regularly go back to.

Maquia does not tell us how much time has passed in the film, and this is a detriment to the enjoyability of some viewers; however, to me, it is wonderful. There are often times when we say to each other that "all of a sudden, so many years have passed" and Maquia captures this feeling eerily well. The time jumps are sudden and often. People change, both in terms of personality and in terms of looks. The world itself changes over time. The world I live in now bears little resemblance to the one that I grew up in. Technology leaps forward, societal norms shift, and our understanding of our place in all of this morphs. That is not counting the countless other factors in our existence that is subject to change over the passage of time. The film captures this by means of the environment changing, the outlooks of the people around the characters, and the characters themselves.

As the characters age, the depiction of growing up is immaculately depicted. This is illustrated beautifully by the behaviour of Ariel. The way he behaves as a child, as a teenager, and as a young man are all incredibly empathetic, and much of it was as if I was looking at myself at the various stages of my life. The younger years when one craves the company of family and the ones you love. The teen years when you are far more volatile, and now whereafter facing a few rounds in the ring with life you are wiser, and are thinking of things that are far more in tune with what you once called a grown up. Despite this, you simultaneously feel as if you know no better than you did when you were 10 years younger.

As a whole, Maquia is an incredibly uplifting film now that I have seen it a second time. Despite the struggle that each different individual goes through, there is the very real chance that, after fighting long and hard, you would be surrounded by those who you love and who love you back. In that regard, it is a lot like a Don Bluth film where the characters go through incredible hardships, and are rewarded by being granted a "happily ever after." Naturally, life is not so clear cut; it is very possible that I may not know more about it even by the time I pass on. I do not count on me knowing more, as I know no more than I did 10 years ago. This particular feeling is captured beautifully in Garden of Words. When life is at a point where you feel you are at a loss, this is one of those films that I will now watch, just as I do Garden of Words, Man of Steel, or any of the other films I love most.

While this piece is far more of a personal anecdote more than an actual review of the film, I do recommend you to go watch it. It is, to this day, the best mother's day film I have ever seen.

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About the Creator

BoblobV2

Writing about anime, and anything else I find interesting.

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