So, that was a challenge that we dealt with. When some of these more minor characters showed up intermittently, we were worried that the audience might not understand who they are, if they see them as their older selves. But a lot of the sub-characters, they’re all human, so they get older, as well. It wasn’t such a big challenge, actually, to draw Ariel changing form. Was it challenging, artistically, to handle the passing of time with your characters? While Maquia never ages beyond a certain point, we see her son Ariel go through a real evolution as he comes of age. Rather than taking really detailed instructions, it was more based on taking hints from little comments here and there, where he was able to create this entire world for us. He’s a really talented person, and he took little hints from lines in the script to create this whole world. He did a great job there, and created this really storybook-like design. I think he did a really excellent job of portraying the Renato, the dragons, the minority tribe, and all these different fantastic elements that I think people tend to really love. The art director on this, who did the design of everything, his name is Tomoaki Okada. I felt that it was different from the typical Japanese characters that you would see, but it was a design that anybody can dive into. When I saw his design, I felt it was different from what Japanese people typically love in the animation world, and I specifically wanted this film to appeal to a global audience. Mari really loved his work, and loved the worldview that he created.
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What was important to capture, when it came to Maquia’s visual style? How was the film’s world brought to life on screen?Īkihiko Yoshida was the person who created the original character designs for this film. To feel the subtleties of these different human relationships, it felt appropriate to use a fantasy world, rather than live-action or real-world animation. There’s even that aspect of the mother and son’s love, so there’s a weird kind of tension there, and if it was based in the real world, it would probably be a little too weird. It’s because these relationships that she portrays are so raw and real. In a lot of the interviews that she’s had so far, she’s spoken a lot about the fantasy world, and the reason she picked non-reality. What were her inspirations in crafting the film’s fantasy world? It seems that Mari put a lot of thought into constructing a unique universe for the film.
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It wasn’t really so much about society, as it was about the humanity of director Okada, and her personal story. Another big theme was how the relationships between people change, as we grow older. That was the biggest theme, I think, for this one. It’s largely about a character that is left behind by society, experiencing time at a different pace than society as a whole. It was really just her upbringing that was the biggest influence on this story. She wasn’t necessarily trying to push that. I don’t think she actually consciously thought about the fact that she’s a woman, and that this was sort of a female-centric story.
![maquia when the promised flower blooms full movie reddit maquia when the promised flower blooms full movie reddit](https://i.imgur.com/RqqN1GF.jpg)
We went around the world, touring with this film, and we got a lot of questions for Mari, because she’s a female director.
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What was Mari hoping to explore, thematically, with this film? 'Spider-Man' Producers Phil Lord & Christopher Miller Bring Miles Morales To Big Screen In Spectacular Style Eleven Arts “The competition is really fierce.” In close collaboration with Okada, the producer helped bring to fruition a visionary work, that could only enliven the form. “Looking at the market, fantasy is a genre that has a really high hurdle,” he explains. “A lot of really amazing talents came together for this film, so my first question was, how do we get them to all recognize her as a director, when she has such little experience?” In addition to this resistance, Horikawa contended with the realities of the anime market, working for a long time to secure a green light. “It was such a big project that a lot of people weren’t sure that she could do it, so there was some resistance met there, and that was also a challenge to push through,” Horikawa reflects. An ambitious anime that conjures up a singular, fantastical world, the Oscar-shortlisted feature centers on Maquia, an immortal girl who takes a newborn baby boy out of dire circumstances, raising him as her own, and watching the relationship blossom into myriad complexities over the years.Ĭertainly, Maquia was an ambitious project for any director to take on, and particularly for a fledgling helmer. After working with screenwriter Mari Okada for a number of years, producer Kenji Horikawa needed to learn to work with the artist in a different way, as she set out to make her directorial debut with Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms.