My feelings on Mari Okada as a writer are... complex. She’s unquestionably talented, and the best of her works capture the raw vulnerability of intense emotion like few other storytellers can match. But even at her best, she’s incredibly messy. Every single show and movie I’ve seen from her- Anohana, Kiznaiver, O Maidens in your Savage Season, A Whisker Away, The One That Shall Not Be Named- makes frustrating choices that handicap the drama and lead to shockingly ill-advised story beats. Her adaptational work is more solid- Toradora and Wandering Son were both excellent- but her original scripts are evidence that she has some serious blind spots when it comes to writing. And sadly, the same is true of her first time directing a feature film. Maquia: Where the Promised Flower Blooms is a bold, ambitious work that does a lot of things very right, but it’s frustratingly imperfect in all the ways Okada works often are. At its best, it’s a movie is genuine, moving beauty. If only it was at its best throughout its entirety, we might have a masterpiece on our hands.

The story takes place in a fantasy world, and it centers on the titular Maquia, a shy, weak member of a race of immortal beings known as the Iolph. These people stop aging as teenagers and live forever with eternal youth. Apparently, tapestries are a form of language among the Iolph, and they can encompass everything from letters to books to full histories. And they spend their whole lives weaving their memories into long tapestries as a way of recording how things have gone for them. They’re also encouraged not to go outside safety of their city; should an Iolph travel to the human world, they will surely experience some form of love there. And in time, when the object of their love grows old and dies, they will be left with nothing but sorrow. “If you love someone,” the elder often tells Maquia, “you will know true loneliness.” Thus the central question of the movie is posed: is it worth it for these immortal beings to experience life among mortals when every emotional connection they make there will one day be severed by time’s inexorable march forward?

Sadly, Maquia finds that choice taken out of her hands when her city is invaded by the nearby human kingdom of Mezarte. Their king desires to conquer the Iolph people and make use of their immortality, both to sire a half-Iolph heir who will live forever and to preserve the lives of the Renato. These Renato are ancient, eternal dragons, but lately they’ve been dying out from some mysterious illness, and now only a scant few of these incredible beasts remain alive, all of which are also held captive in Mezarte. The city is ramsacked, and Maquia barely makes it out alive. In the outside world for the first time, all alone, she happens to stumble across a newborn baby cradled by its mother’s corpse, another victim of Mezarte’s lust for conquest. Seeing in the human child a reflection of their own loneliness, Maquia decides to raise him as his mother, so that they may share each other’s strength in the face of life’s tragedies. Thus, the movie proper begins, and we spend the rest of it following the lives of Maquia and her adopted son Ariel. It’s the story of an unusual mother raising an unusual son, set against the backdrop of political turmoil as the kingdoms of man grow ever closer to war.

So, good stuff first: I really love this movie’s fantasy world. It’s richly detailed and lived-in, with gorgeous settings from simple farmsteads to sprawling kingdoms. The story does a fantastic job selling you on the reality of these places; every location we visit feels like a place people actually live thanks to countless little touches and wordless worldbuilding that brings them to life. It also helps that this is a PA Works production, and you better believe they know their way around beautiful background art and setting design, especially on a movie budget. Maquia is gorgeous to look at from start to finish, and even the occasional use of CG doesn’t interfere too much. I also love how the fantastical elements are integrated, not just into the world itself but the story’s themes. As Ariel grows older and Maquia remains a teenager, their mother-son relationship grows increasingly complex as they’re forced to navigate increasingly thorny questions of what it even means to be a mother and son. What is it that defines their relationship, and how does that definition shift when only one of them is growing older? What, if anything, makes Maquia his mother, and how does she live up to that concept? How will their bond survive as he grows increasingly apart in age and she remains eternally fixed in time? It’s powerful stuff, and the mythic weight of the dying dragons subplot further emphasizes the themes of immortality, memory, endings and beginnings.

These things are the heart of the film, and whenever it’s focused on them, Maquia damn near soars. Its title character riding one of the dragons, the warmth of her love for Ariel, his increasing inability to see her as his mother because of time tearing them apart, a pretty damn epic final battle when the political intrigue explodes into open warfare, all of it rendered with tenderness and awe in equal measure. And the lengthy post-climax epilogue, which brings Airel and Maquia’s story to a breathtaking conclusion, is worth the price of admission all on its own. If the final ten minutes don’t leave you a sobbing mess, you’re probably a heartless bastard. Unfortunately, the journey to reach that point isn’t always satisfying. There are a lot of confusing time skips throughout the story, where we’ll jump ahead a few years and see Maquia and Ariel in a new location and have little to no indication of how long it’s been, or where this place is in relation to the last place. At first, you don’t even realize some of them are timeskips until you put the pieces together from context clues. It’s needlessly confusing, and it leads to the movie’s flow being kind of disjointed. Even just a title card saying, like, “three years later” would’ve been enough to solve this issue.

More critically, though, Maquia is meant to be a treatise on the power of motherhood, but its approach to that subject feels... misguided at times. There’s a subplot centered on one of Maquia’s Iolphian friends who is captured to become the king’s baby mama, and while the film acknowledges how awful it is that she’s been forced into this role, it also portrays it like the child born from this awful situation is the only thing keeping her from falling apart. Like, she’s imprisoned and kept from seeing her child, and she understandably starts breaking down from the sheer trauma of it all, but it’s presented like the thought of seeing her child is the one thing still giving her hope. She even chooses not to escape with Maquia when she’s pregnant, and it’s really uncomfortable how it’s framed like her being pregnant is something that binds her to the person who impregnated her. Even when she finally escapes at the end after meeting her daughter for the first and only time, it’s framed like this was a precious memory she’ll weave into her tapestry and never forget, and... no! No, it really doesn’t need to be! This child was a product of rape. She has no obligation to keep it, to feel obligated to it, to stay with the man who raped her as if motherhood was a shackle she had no choice but to endure. And what’s doubly bizarre is that Ariel is never framed as being “less” of Maquia’s son just because he’s adopted, so the movie clearly understands that biological bonds aren’t the be-all-end-all of parenting. So why the hell does it make this other character’s story revolve around her undying love for a child she’s never met, born from violation and assault, and treat that bond as equally important to its understanding of motherhood? It doesn’t make a damn lick of sense.

And that discomfort is ultimately what kneecaps Maquia. There are other minor problems- there’s little sense of spatial awareness to the world and characters kind of teleport between scene with no sense of how long it took to get from point A to point B, some side characters feel underdeveloped, Ariel doesn’t always feel like a realistic kid in the first chunk- but as a story explicitly about motherhood, the fact it ends up feeling so creepy about motherhood is a thorn I can’t shake off. If you cut that subplot, Maquia and Ariel’s story works just fine on its own, but its presence taints the waters and muddies a picture that should have been crystal clear. If this is what Maquia thinks of motherhood, I don’t know if that’s a version of motherhood worth honoring. Which is Mari Okada’s issue in a nutshell; however good her works are at their best, her writing always steers into problematic territory that infects her messages with an unpleasant aftertaste. This movie is still excellent at its best, but I can’t fully give myself to it when part of its ethos is so obviously wrong. And combined with the more tangible storytelling flaws I mentioned earlier, it turns what should have been a slam dunk into a “good, with caveats.”