maboroshi

The vision of Maboroshi, in my experience, was unique. The first half of the film is promising, intriguing. It introduces a highly fascinating mystery, equally captivating themes, and an absolutely monumental aesthetic that creates a cohesive beauty. This aesthetic aligns perfectly with the mystery surrounding it, including the dragons and the cracks—it’s all very well done.

The role of the factory, an unconventional location for a mystery narrative, manages in Maboroshi to take on and embody that aura of mystery. It’s a type of mystery you wouldn’t expect, or even associate, with a place like a steel factory. Yet, it’s precisely this unconventional aspect of the location that makes everything even more mysterious.

I started to think about it: all this mystery tied to a place like a steel factory—the smoke it emits, an essential element of a factory’s operations—has been cleverly tied to the mechanics of the plot’s mystery. The smoke, a mundane feature of the factory, becomes part of the story's mysterious mechanics. This link between mystery and the factory, within the narrative framework of Maboroshi, is even more convincing because it is the factory itself that hides the mystery. And this is directly tied to the smoke it releases.

This is what gives vitality, conviction, and a true aura of fascination to the mystery narrated by Maboroshi. The revelation of the mystery is also satisfying. We discover that the factory in an alternate reality, separate from the film’s "real" world (the baseline reality, so to speak), exploded, claiming the lives of many inhabitants of the town where it was located. Consequently, the gods—who likely, or theoretically, watched over the real town of Mifuse (the name of the town where the factory exploded)—created an alternate reality. In this alternate world, they imprisoned the essence of the people who had died, saving them.

It is as if these deities wanted to preserve the reality of Mifuse before the explosion. They preserved both the city’s aesthetics and the essence of the people who had died, or whose lives would have been devastated by the explosion. After all, the explosion affected the entire town, even those who survived.

The gods, however, imposed a condition on this alternate world: the people would live in this illusory world, where the factory—previously the cause of death in the real world—now became the source of life. The factory’s smoke was used by the gods as a kind of home or habitat. The dragon—or rather, the wolf of smoke, whose body is made of the factory's emissions—intervenes when cracks appear. These cracks are formed by what? By the emotions of the people living in the illusory world.

The gods' idea was to create this illusory reality, a crystallization of Mifuse's "golden days," so to speak, so that the memory of the place would remain eternal. However, they realized that the people living in this reality didn’t even recognize the illusory world they were part of. This ignorance provoked emotions—love, hate, anger, resentment, melancholy. These feelings disrupted the natural order of the illusory world, a world meant to be a crystallization of humanity. The emotions caused literal cracks in the reality.

To address this, the smoke wolf, a manifestation of 50% of the gods and 50% of the factory’s smoke, intervenes to close the cracks from time to time. This situation worsens significantly when the real world begins to breach the illusory one, marking the first instance of such an event.

Itsumi, a little girl, daughter of Masamune and Mutsumi, has a version of herself in the illusory world. But in that world, the parents don’t know her or even recognize that she is their child. Itsumi is locked away by a cult led by a preacher posing as a politician or factory worker. In truth, he is one of the few who understood how everything worked. He realized that Itsumi, coming from the real world, carried with her an overwhelming amount of emotions because she was a child—and children are the embodiment of raw, genuine feelings.

He understood that if Itsumi left the factory, she would see the outside world, the perfect world crystallized in Mifuse’s golden days, and would shatter everything. She would create cracks of unprecedented magnitude.

From this point on, and with Itsumi’s appearance, the credibility of the mystery in the film began to decline, in my opinion. The figure of the little girl, trapped in the factory, dressed simply, with an air of vulnerability, carried a sense of mystery. But the main character, Masamune, a young man burdened with uncertainty and doubt, sees this figure and gradually begins to unravel the mystery.

For me, everything falls apart when Maboroshi starts becoming overly melancholic and sentimental. The narrative focus on the love between Masamune and Mutsumi, while deep, doesn’t fit with the tone of the mystery. They are supposed to be 14 years old, and the kiss scene felt excessive to me. I understand that, on paper, they’re eternally young, and mentally they’ve likely matured beyond 14 years, experiencing deeper emotions. However, a love scene that intense doesn’t suit the film’s tone in terms of age of the characters.

The subplot about Mutsumi’s love for her father—initially misunderstood as a crush and later revealed to be filial love—also detracts from the mysterious, intense nature of Maboroshi. While I love melancholic and emotional settings in films, I didn’t want to see this in Maboroshi. I would have preferred it in a film like Your Name.

In Your Name, there is a small element of mystery within the story, but the focus isn’t on the mystery of the comet. The comet has a lore, details that Shinkai subtly includes, but the viewer’s primary focus is the love story between Taki and Mitsuha. The point of Your Name is that the mystery exists but is secondary to the romance.

Maboroshi does the opposite: the love story exists, but it was supposed to show the mystery first. Yet it backtracks on this promise, emphasizing romance instead, which undermines the themes of the film. This is the impression it left on me.

The ending is good, though, as it regains some coherence with the film’s original themes.

So, what can we say about Maboroshi? It’s an absolutely enjoyable film that captivates you. It gives the impression of being different, a special film of higher caliber—at least in the first half. That’s how it felt for me.

It’s a film with a very pleasing aesthetic. It has some directorial choices that I really appreciated. It features a great soundtrack and excellent Japanese voice acting, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

And while the second-half flaws are noticeable, in the grand scheme of things, when you look at the film as a whole, they don’t ruin it. The film is simply weakened by them—it loses some of its impact, depth, and credibility, in my opinion. Not so much in terms of the plot itself, but in the way the viewer engages with the plot.

That said, it remains a very solid film. It’s definitely worth watching if you’re looking for something thought-provoking, a film with depth in its story that challenges and engages the audience.

Without a doubt, I recommend watching Maboroshi.