Anime 35851 Sayonara No Asa Ni Yakusoku No Hana Wo Kazarou Reviews Filter Check 3

[Warming Spoilers]

I went into this movie with high expectations, after all, it has incredibly high reviews and as of this review is the 21st highest ranked movie on MAL. While others seem to think this movie was incredible I for one was unable to be moved. I want to focus this review on the three main parts of the movie I found to be its downfall; characters, story, and pacing.

Characters:
This movie is at its heart a character drama dealing with the feelings of love and loss. Because of this it is incredibly important to write your characters in a way that makes them worthy of ... the audiences attention. This movie fails to do that. The main reason behind this in my opinion is lack of character development. Our main cast is never properly developed throughout this movies 115 minute run time. The only decent piece of character development we get happens in the first scene of the movie where Leilia jumps off a cliff into the water and Maquia refuses to follow, while Krim lectures Leilia for slacking off. This scene shows us that Leilia is an easy going carefree girl while Maquia is scared and timid and Krim hard working and disciplined. Yet these personality traits are never again exemplified in any of these characters. Through the rest of the movie these characters dont seem to show any unique traits to themselves nor any reason for us as an audience to be invested in them.

Story:
For me story was by far the part of this movie which dragged me out of it the most. The overall plot is not my issue but rather the writing and characters motivations for their actions. Throughout this movie many changes in the story are brought upon by a characters decision to do something. Yet, nearly none of these actions seem to make any sense in relation to the characters interests nor do they show any semblance of rational thought. Below are a few examples of awful writing that took me out of the movie.
- Leilia refusing to escape after being rescued by Maquia. She decides this under the guise that Krim wouldnt be able to look at her again, but for her to think this about being pregnant with a child that was forced upon her (and conceived through rape) is nothing but thick plot armor.
- Maquia deciding not to return home to Mido after failing to capture back Leilia. This would have been the objectivly best decision for the welfare of her child and would have avoided the hard grueling life her and Ariel led thereafter.
- Ariel leaving his wife to fight in the battle. This mans wife is nearly expecting to have a child which he himself calls his future, yet he is more than ready to give that all up to risk his life as a foot soldier for a regime which is made clear to be the wrong side of the fight throughout the movie. Usually in a movie if your main character is going to risk their life in battle it should be for something, not at its behest.
Speaking of Ariel leaving, Ariel's ability to leave right before something horrible happens to those he loves most is so timely that it borders on comedic. Whether its leaving Maquia to join the army only for her to be kidnapped minutes later or leaving his wife to fight in the army right before she goes into labor Ariel has a knack for leaving his loved ones when they need it most. For a character whose desires are to be there to protect the ones he loves, he fails at it in the worst ways possible every time.

Pacing:
The last major issue I had with this movie was the pacing. For a movie that covers such a long period of time with a large cast of characters spanning many locations to work the pacing must be effective. This movie fails to do so. Often times I found myself wondering where or when I was at in this stories large world due to the seemingly random cuts in it. These cuts prevent us as an audience from knowing much if anything at all about characters feelings or motivations behind the actions we see them participating in. This is a major error which took greatly away from the flow of the film.

In the end I feel there was lots of room for potential in this story. The world building and animation were incredible and the narrative was quite touching. If PA Works had instead decided to make this story into a TV show with more time to develop their characters and fill in the story I am sure we would have been left with a far greater final product.

I haven’t watched anime in over a year and I wanted to revisit its form through a good entry point. There was a lot of social media buzz surrounding this movie. People on this site were giving it 9’s and 10’s and even one of my favorite musicians, Porter Robinson, tweeted about this movie and how good it was. And so, I selected this movie on a cozy Friday night with a bowl of soup and high expectations.

Wow. It is disappointing in countless aspects over the course of its two hour runtime. I am writing this review so that you can save yourself the ... time I wasted!

To say the least, disappointment started to creep in before the halfway mark had even hit. If you’re looking for a film that dives head-first into a deep, emotional, and realistic exploration of paternal ties, then forget this movie. This introduction starts off with a good premise. The story revolves around an ancient clan isolated from the other factions of the world due to their immortality. This sets up a good framework for the exploration of isolation, segregation, and xenophobia but its actually never explored to its fullest extent. The movie is riddled with ridiculous plot holes, nonsensical character development, and layered with incestual undertones between a mother-son relationship. Often times, many of the side characters introduced are one-dimensional and completely stray from their motives in later sequences to elicit a cheap, emotional response from the audience. Their arcs make no sense in regards to the plot and indicate a lack of respect for coherent storytelling. The only saving grace of this movie is the animation, which is detailed and breathtaking in some sequences.

You’re better off watching Ookami Kodomo no Ame to Yuki than this garbled mess.

(Full disclosure: I did watch Maquia on an in-flight entertainment system. I strongly believe it had no impact on my overall impression of the movie, but who knows, maybe if I had gotten to see it in theaters I would feel differently about it than I do.)

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 here. 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.

I'll keep this short -- this movie was a huge let-down. The first quarter/half or so was at least fairly interesting and quickly took a downturn in the second act. If you want, you can stop reading here.

The characters pretty much all sucked, with motivations/thought processes that remained as uncompelling as they were transient -- meaning that not only did they not make sense, but they weren't consistent either.

The only truly interesting character was Krim, a side character who functions only as a punching bag for the story to push it's weird theme. Which is namely that...

The story seems to have no other theme ... than shoving in our face that motherhood is next to sainthood and that all we should care about is pumping out children.

The animation was really good, but the story didn't live up to it in the slightest. Characters kind of all sucked or were boring, with the exception of Krim, who was barely shown or explored, and who got screwed anyways. Not only was the theme weird and shoved in our faces, but it wasn't interesting explored in the least, making it not only a weird/bad theme, but a poorly executed one as well.

I can see why people cried during the showings -- probably because they lost two hours of their life to this.

Maybe I wrote for you obviously thing - but crisis of ideas was come.
In our time, when existing pop-culture become part of our life, and where all 36 dramatic situations were used more than once, where have already used all possible settings. Create something new, unrepeatable, something that never made before very difficult, more of then - impossible. But all time possible to show one or another story to another angle, bring something individual, and eventually good play to story.
But it were only some solid facts, lets for review about movie.

"When the Promised Flower ... Blooms" is very ambition movie: big budget, quality animation, impressive backgrounds. But how this ofhen happen, wanted to do as best and it turned out as always.
First it's 3D, well can't, can't japanese artists made good 3D animation.
Second season of "Berserk", "Batman ninja", existing proofs of my words.
When in movie appeared dragons, which made in 3D, and this low poligonal models flew and cooperate with perfect 2D. It was sad, and spoiled impression of visual of this movie.

Story weak, characters not to the end revealed, they superficial, and not detailed. Characters have not enough charismas and good motivatons. General heroes all time sad, cry, and feel realy-realy bad, but you don't empathize of them. Because they empty, Ariel - empty, Maquia only cry and thats all. Sometimes they replics was unrealist, artificial and had much pathos. And romantic side between heroes very weak.

It's wrong when this movie, has so much mistakes. Like a part of art, It must be hight in aspect of significance. So much people hard worked and in conclusion made this. It is incomprehensible!
If it masterpiece, it must be don't let any reason to hate this. If somebody said - "the characters didn't develope!" quickly show arguments for him/her, "this", "this" and "this". Again somebody said - "setting is cliche!", again show arguments. And they sit with open eyes and open mouths and don't know what to say. Empty words, nothing else.
Because over time, me will die, you will die, we all will die, but art, art will be "live". And if it's something great, amazing, besides of - perfect, it will be actual and interesting in future. And no one low word can be spoil this.
But it was only my "mindless" stuff.
What about this movie: It's sad or fun? This ... This is a sadly ...

So let's get the obvious things out of the way. Yoshida's art was as gorgeous as ever, so was Kazuhiro's music direction. These two could turn even the worst story into a marvel to behold.

However, when you get used to the great animation, you start noticing the problems with this movie.

It started off decently, the setting was interesting, I was excited to learn more about the world. The coming-of-age and motherhood aspect of it all was compelling and well written. But at about midway through the movie, the actions of the characters stop making any sense and are basically written/taken to get the story going ... to lead to the grand finale.

The characters just give up on their ideals multiple time throughout the story.

But really, I am writing this review mainly to get to this one complaint: Leilia refuses to go with Krim BECAUSE she says she loves her daughter and can't give up on her, Krim being supposedly the love of her life and her dilemma was longing for her home and people while also giving birth to her child. After telling him why she can't escape with him she proceeds to let him die in front of her eyes, deciding she is willing to do so to stay with her daughter. All this happens so that later, when Maquia appears, after a very short exchange she realizes she actually DOES want to go back to her people and can't stay with mortal humans and make her daughter happy, so when her daughter sees her mom for the first time, she just tells her to forget about her and proceeds to jump off a clif on the back of a dragon to fly away.

I think I don't even need to go into the details of how the story got there, because really, there isn't much to back up such a ridiculous conclusion. Up to this point, the movie still could be redeemed because it had multiple compelling and good stories and characters being explored. But honestly, this conclusion just cannot be overlooked and was the driving motivation for Maquia all along (saving Leilia) and absolutely ruined the experience for me. I am still very sad such amazing diorection was wasted on this conclusion.

Let's be honest and clear the only good thing about this piece is backgrounds. There are good, but not amazing. But that's not even half of the issue. Characters. Beginning with design and ending with what comes out of them is straightforward terrible. I didn't shed a single tear unlike most. I guess they haven't seen something truly touching.

It's almost 2 hours long, but first half was just wasted on god only knows what. Drama for the sake of drama, banal lines and flat characters that aren't developing but focused on one idea that's not driving the story or them anywhere. Click. One of ... the main characters decides to move on (thank god!). Click. He's in the army now. Click. He got his childhood chick pregnant. That happens in less than 30 minutes after that wasted first half.

There are couple of good moments but that's not enough from stopping you from breaking the screen. I wish they all died a painful death. But no. My wishes won't come true. Half are nearly (or completely) immortal. The other half lived an overall peaceful life. There's almost nothing about the world, situations or story overall that can involve, they focus on annoying characters instead.

I wanted to like this movie, I really did. The art and music are lovely and the story has so much potential but it continually falls flat of what it clearly wanted to be. It momentarily touches on a lot of deep emotional and philosophical concepts but fails to actually explore a single one of them in a meaningful way.

The biggest failing this movie has is that it continually chooses to "tell" instead of "show". Everything we learn about every character in this movie is because they outright say "I feel [x]!" and we're expected to just go along with it despite there often being ... absolutely nothing to back up the feelings being expressed. After watching the two main two characters for a full two hours I genuinely could not describe their personalities aside from what they've outright said they feel about one another (which is honestly pretty undefined). They are given no real temperament, likes or dislikes, or motivation to do the things they do. The backing characters are even worse - they usually show up only to say something that's supposed to be thought-provoking or emotional and then vanish again.

For a movie that's centered around the concept of the passage of time, the plot is also all over the place. We are given no concrete sense of how much time has passed between scenes and it skips around constantly. The politics of the world/country/etc, for example, are mentioned in broad strokes from time to time but are never elaborated on despite being treated like they're an important part of the plot. What we do get is a lot of what I'll call "feelings porn" - sudden, overtly dramatic scenes that basically hit the viewer over the head with "[x] sad thing is happening and this is why you should feel sad about it!!".

Anyway, I'm glad some people enjoyed this movie but if you're looking for something fleshed-out and profound this one isn't for you.

Warning: SPOILERS

I don't think I can write a sincere review without spoiling some parts that irritated me. Yes, I can see why people would cry to this movie, but I'd only expect a handful of people to actually be overcome by emotions. Why? I didn't feel sad while watching this movie because most of the emotional interactions felt forced and botched. Not to mention that there is no depth to any of the characters, which makes their actions in the climax seem forced as well. An example is when Ariel comes home drunk and pushes his mom down. Trust me, there was some weird ass ... tension between them that almost made me think he had a thing for his mom. Not to mention the scene where Leilia tells Krim she can't go with him because she wants to see her fucking daughter? Then Krim dies like an irrelevant mutt on the side of a road? And when Leilia is given a chance to see her daughter, she books it and runs away happily to the dragon? Leilia's daughter who also wanted to see her mom for years, is somehow so mature that she understands what just happened and accepts it? The way this movie unravels is like a huge maze with lots of dead ends, arriving at the one-way ending that they wanted to force from the very beginning. Overall the animation is great, but you'd have to be super emotional if this movie makes you tear up, as the shitty characters and interactions make the movie feel insincere and ruins many moments.

Me and my friend were eagerly wanting to find a new movie to gaze our eyes upon. When we stumbled about this movie. It had decent reviews and ranked quite high on MAL so we decided, why not, and gave it a watch. few seconds in and we were already in awe of the art. we got excited. Then as the first character stumbled on my screen I saw they had no nose and thought huh that weird. Basically no one had a nose so ummmm yeh no dropped it. if u wanna watch a movie with people who run around with no nose watch ... this. They probably all stink because they can't smell anything.

I'm gonna go against the grain on this one. I think this movie had a lot of issues that I just couldn't get through. It could've been really good too, I get why people like it. SOME SPOILERS.

I'll start off with the stuff I liked. It was very pretty (though the CGI dragons were ugly and distracting). The music was good too from what I remember. And the scene where Maquia found and saved baby Ariel was my favorite throughout the whole movie. Now to my complaints.

I could tell right off the bat that the vitality of Maquia's people was going to be ... a plot point thanks to the narration at the beginning. This seems like such a huge misstep, as it would have been so much more fascinating to let the audience piece this together themselves. If we hadn't known, we'd be left in the dark as to why they were being attacked and kidnapped, there would be mystery and intrigue at least. We'd still know who the bad guys were obviously, but we wouldn't know their motives (show, don't tell). This was a minor complaint so I'll move on.

I thought the characters were either extremely boring or unlikable. There was a point where I thought Ariel was going to have romantic feelings for Maquia, his mother, and while that would have been gross, it at least would have been interesting, something I hadn't seen (in conventional TV). Instead, it's the same "I must protect you" motivation I've seen a million times. In the wake of a tragedy, Maquia decides to save a helpless infant and devote her life to raising it. On paper, that sounds good and it grabbed me at first, but lost me very quickly. Most mothers care for their sons, and most sons love their mothers. Neither their motivations nor their actions were enough to keep me invested in them. I absolutely hated Izol. He kidnapped Leilia, let's her get raped, then all of the sudden feels guilty? He knew what he was doing. Maybe just don't do the bad thing in the first place. I was extremely frustrated with Leilia's decision to stay, it boggled my mind. No one else really stood out for me, which meant that I didn't have anyone to root for not even half way in to the movie.

Again, the story grabbed me for the first 10-15 minutes, but then it just lost me. I didn't like the "evil king wanting power" plot point, I didn't like Leilia's story, and Maquia's and Ariel's relationship wasn't enough to carry the film for me. I hope it doesn't sound like I'm spitting vitriol, I wish I could've felt what others did at that ending scene. I just didn't unfortunately.

There are many series and movies in the Anime industry that doesn't make any sense and some people still love them for some reason, "Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms" is a good example for this kind of bad writing people still love.

In "Maquia" there's a big world with a good amount of side characters, such as the mystic dragon-like creatures that slowly annihilated, The people of Iorph who isolated themselves from the rest of the world, and the humans who obviously are the "bad" race that destroys everything for power.
Yet, with all the potential of the world surrounding our characters, throughout the whole ... movie, we get very little information about the world our story taking place in. The world wasn't just some extra detail they decided not to expand in the movie, it's actually an important part we need to know so the end would make sense.

And it's not only the world that wasn't expanded enough, nothing is expanded in "Maquia". The movie feels like there's 10 years old story we were expected to know. Every decision the characters made would make more sense if we knew where they came from.

There's nothing special about the plot itself, but it still had the potential to become a good fantasy movie, especially with such a professional staff.
I can't recommend a movie that feels like you started near the end of it, it's not worth the time.

I have no idea what everyone is praising this movie for. It's full of shallow, unoriginal perspectives on motherhood, little to no character (girls are "mom" and boys are "child" or "husband", there are no personalities or development besides characters getting older or one word descriptions like "crybaby" and "tomboy" in the first 5 minutes that never become relevant) and plot points that lead nowhere. There is too much flirting with incest for me to ignore, which is horrible and uncomfortable, and there is an odd fascination with rape. Every single character is cookie cutter predictable in action, the Iorphians are needlessly difficult to tell ... apart, and the ending was completely emotionless. Sure there was a montage to try and tug at heartstrings, but I was so confused over why the girls ran off and about the pointless abandoned plot threads that I didn't even care, and there was never anything to make me connect with the characters besides the constant shouting of "SHE'S HIS MOM" over and over. I was raised by a single mother, and that sort of narrative is best SHOWN, not blandly stated with little actual emotion in the scenes. The whole movie felt rushed, even though it wasn't any shorter than most, and I'm left baffled and disappointed in all the 10 star reviews. The art is mostly pretty, but everything else was a disappointment. If you want a story with meaningful emotional single mom payoff, listen to Dear Evan Hansen or something. Hell, Highway 20 Ride has more emotion than this movie does.