maboroshi

The positives about Maboroshi start with MAPPA, and they end there as well. The animation is detailed, the lighting is fine, the colour grading fits, and there’s clearly decent budget behind it. But once you get past the animation, it quickly becomes clear that the story has no idea what it wants to be, and the emotional tone is completely off the rails. It’s a complete mess. While I expect that from Mari Okada, this was a new low.

The film tries to blend fantasy and coming-of-age drama in true Shinkai fashion, but it leans so hard into the Shinkaisms that it ends up being a cheap abominable amalgamation of the worst from both Okada and Shinkai. It’s a feral, clueless chimera baby made from the carcass of Suzume/Weathering with You and A Whisker Away. As expected, the characters keep crying, shouting, and spiral so often that you start to feel numb to it all. The film assumes that volume and intensity are the same thing as depth. Instead of feeling moved, I mostly felt confused. Zero focus. Okada is sure to include a traumatic emotional "core" that’s meant to feel profound but plays out like self-parody, and a surreal premise that falls apart the second you ask, “Okay, but why though?” It’s like she’s writing on autopilot, recycling tropes and hoping it lands because it’s been “intense” before.

Plot-wise, it throws in a bunch of supernatural ideas and weaves it together with an incestuous (literally) main plotline. They feel less like meaningful metaphors and more like distractions from the fact that there’s not much actually happening. There’s a kind of dream-logic at play, but not the compelling kind — more like the kind that makes you check the time and wonder how much longer this is going to go on. There are all these fantastical moments, steampunk factories, timelines, big glowing machines — but it’s all window dressing. None of it means anything, because the film never slows down to let anything mean anything. It's all spectacle with no soul. Couldn't even add in the emotional family reunion scene they built up because the incest plotline would break. Could not even bring character growth to the girl outside of the regular cosmetic changes.

You can tell the animators did some work, and the world they created could’ve been interesting with a tighter, more grounded script. But the writing leans too heavily on vague emotional gestures and surreal spectacle, without giving you a reason to care. All that steampunk aesthetic wasted for Mari Okada’s umpteenth try at recreating her AnoHana fame.

In the end, Maboroshi is about as hollow as the pipes in that steam factory. It mistakes chaos for complexity and intensity for emotion. It’s all noise, and I wished that I was erased from reality instead. Still, it’s animated too well for rating it any lower, and I have watched worse.