Maquia has to be the most letdown I have ever been by an anime movie. It isn't really due to the fact that it was overhyped, even thought that did play a factor into my disappointment. It was mainly because I genuinely liked it.

This movie suffers from a lack of focus. The strongest aspect of it is easily the parent-child relationship between Maquia and Ariel. How Maquia and Ariel's relationship develops perfectly represents how parental bonds grow over time. Maquia and Ariel got the spotlight for most of the movie, and helped me ignore the fact that most other aspects of the story ranged from mediocre to bad.

Way too many of Maquia's side characters and aspects of its world feel like they are given little focus. The movie kept on piling new side characters and worldbuilding details, so that most of these new aspects of the story got their time of day. In a TV series, expanding the horizons of the world like this would actually work to its benefit. There is a lot more time to flesh everything in that format, so that things don't feel rushed. But this isn't a TV show. This is a movie. Movies have to be as concise as possible, so they can't waste time adding new elements to the story. This problem eventually ends up being the movie's downfall, but I could ignore it in the first 70 minutes, mainly because it was pushed into the background. Maquia and Ariel's relationship was so intriguing to watch, that it didn't exactly matter to me that this problem even existed. This was the case, until the final third.

The last 40 minutes ruined any enjoyment I had for this movie. All of the unnecessary additions to the story come to the forefront of the film. Characters like Lillia had the conclusion of her character arc, but there was a lack of any of the convincing buildup required to get to that point. Dita is thrown in out of nowhere, where she is suddenly introduced to give a last minute conflict involving her and Ariel's baby. Krim's character is so poorly explained, that any time that he had on screen left me confused. There was a war going on in the background of the climax, but there was no setup for the war actually happening. I don't even think I know the name for the opposing side. Everything managed to feel forced in such a baffling way. While Maquia and Ariel's scenes were pretty touching, it couldn't salvage the mess that was happening around them.

As a whole, this movie felt extremely betraying. With a lot of movies and TV shows that I dislike, I know that I won't like it from the very beginning, and it keeps that same consistent quality of bad throughout the whole thing. These type of cases don't exactly leave much of an effect on me. Movies like Maquia will always be the type of thing that will always bother me. The movie had so much going for it, but it botched it at the most important point. Maquia is a movie that had so much potential to be amazing, but it got bogged down by its many problems to the point that it became a mediocre one.