“Hidden away from the eyes of men, the Iorph live out their peaceful lives that span centuries, never aging beyond adolescence. One fateful day, the peaceful lives of the Iorph are shattered when the kingdom of Mezarte invades, seeking the secret to the Iorph’s long life. Torn from her people and her home, Maquia is overcome with grief when she finds an orphaned boy, just as lonely as she. Maquia adopts the boy, Ariel, as her own and ventures forward into a strange new world that will test the power of a mother and son’s love for each other.” – Official Synopsis
Maquia has a long, interesting story. The run time is almost two hours and they jam pack it full of content.
They tackled a lot of big themes: motherhood, the way different people respond to tragedy, the cyclical nature of life, and probably some more. Honestly, there might be too many. Some of the characters almost have to monologue for you to understand what they’re supposed to represent. However, it is anime, so you kind of expect the characters to be monologuing.
Since it isn’t rated by the MPAA, I will state that it does cover some fairly adult topics, so spoilers ahead. For one, the reason Mezarte invades the Iorph homeland is so that they can find a suitor for the unwed prince and intertwine the royal bloodline with longevity of the Iorph. There are also some off-color comments about the Iorph sprinkled here and there. Part of the setting of Maquia is that humans are racist against the Iorph. Since that’s not a main theme, they never really resolve it or make any moral statement claiming that people shouldn’t act that way. The racism is just sort of there. So, if you intend to show this to kids be prepared to possibly explain a few things.
The last thing I will say about the story is that the time scale can be disorienting. Since you’re following the life of a character who lives for centuries the life of a human can seem very short. The writing re-orients you very well though, by quickly reintroducing the characters with their new looks.
Speaking of looks, it’s a modern, glossy anime. The 2D animation is great. It’s incredibly fluid and overall well done. The lighting in a lot of the scenes was interesting and fairly well thought out.
The line work does look a little thin whenever the characters were at a distance though. The characters also didn’t have a lot of detail. Most didn’t really have noses, which isn’t a big deal, but it makes the characters all look the same. The characters were also kind of flat; they didn’t have a lot of form.
The backgrounds look beautiful, until they move. The animation team used 3D models for almost all of the backgrounds and the stills look great, honestly. The problem is that they don’t move the same way. In Richard Williams’ book, The Animator’s Survival Kit he analogizes 3D animation to puppeteering. While this may not be accurate to the workflow, it is important to highlight that the nuance between making the two styles move believably is different. In Maquia there’s a scene where Maquia flies away from her homeland on a dragon-esque beast. This scene in particular really shows the how these two different types move differently. I believe that it is possible to make either look good, and, hypothetically, you can make both look good together. I haven’t consistently seen it here, though.
Thankfully, the story’s good enough to overshadow these shortcomings.
