Maquia is a disappointment. If you enjoyed the movie, by all means go ahead and enjoy it - but to me it lacks the space to really drive its narrative and themes home, and as a result characters who should be interesting and compelling come off one dimensional and occasionally annoying as the thematic resolution falls flat. First things foremost, though: I have absolutely nothing against Mari Okada or her work on this project. She has her fair share of haters and her style is not always my thing, but she does a fantastic job with what she is given on this project. Thanks to P.A. Works, Maquia sports a visual flavor and pace that the shows she wrote just never had, and it allows Okada to try her hand at a larger scope than she's ever dealt with.

My first, second, and third problems with this movie can be boiled down to a single word: time. There's just not enough. I'm sorry, you cannot spin this huge generation-spanning epic starring an ageless lead, dissecting her relationship with the humans around her who age and die before her eyes, and then cram it into barely 100 minutes. When Maquia visits Ariel in the film's epilogue, a moment that should feel poignant and heavy with the weight of almost a century of events leaves little to no impact. This needed likely a full cour to really get the meat out of the story - and get this! If this had been in the form of a 1 or 2-cour TV anime, I probably would have loved it. Drum up the art and animation quality a bit more, sink your teeth in more to Maquia's narrative, and tell the whole story so you can actually feel the time pass. That way the audience can actually invest in the characters, most of all Maquia herself, and you can pursue some semblance of a resolution. Without time, you have nothing with which to hammer home your main themes, and everything you've built falls apart. If you can use your imagination to fill the years-long gaps in the narrative, power to ya, but the film simply does not do enough on its own to convince me of its thematic or character resolutions.

Again: there are legitimate moments of pure inspiration here. 15 year old Maquia sobbing trying to figure out breastfeeding was probably the most moving moment of the whole film, and the final scene was something else (though should the climax of a movie this big have been better? who knows). Okada plays with her motifs in a refreshingly powerful way, and there is clearly thought behind the development of theme ideas as the movie progresses. Maquia just doesn’t have the space to take them all the way.

P.A. Works, or Mari Okada herself, or whoever, made the (wrong) decision that this story was best told in movie format and attempted to recount over ninety years in under two hours. Yes, a large chunk of that time is tacked on in the epilogue, but the main plot covers over two decades of time - still not enough in my opinion, but way too much to be squished into the total runtime of an eight minute short.