This Week in Anime
Mari Okada's Rise: From Anohana to Maboroshi

by Nicholas Dupree & Monique Thomas,

Nick and Nicky look back on how Mari Okada's voice as a writer and director lead up to her strangest anime entry yet, maboroshi.

Maquia - When the Promised Flower Blooms, anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day, Kiznaiver, and Lupin III: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine are available on Crunchyroll. O Maidens in Your Savage Season is available on HIDIVE. A Whisker Away and Maboroshi are available on Netflix.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.


@Lossthief @BeeDubsProwl @NickyEnchilada @vestenet

Nick
Nicky, I have been waiting for this day for entirely too long. After years of pining and waiting and desperation, we finally get to see MABOROSHI, colloquially known (by me) as Mari Okada's Horny Apocalypse movie. I am ready to pump that sucker directly into my ocular nerve with a syringe. Just f*ck me up, Okada.
Nicky
People who read our Secret Santas column would know that I watched Mari Okada's directorial debut Maquia a few weeks ago as part of the challenge, during which I discovered that her second outing as director was very close by. Formerly titled Alice and Therese's Illusory Factory, MABOROSHI is a spiritual sequel to Maquia, sharing much of the same staff who followed Okada to MAPPA for the production. Mari Okada has been a notable anime writer for years, but it's rare to see a writer also dabbling with directing like this. It made me all the more curious after a fantastic showing that Maquia was.
Meanwhile, I've been sold since I saw this movie's initial trailer. Everything about it screams Maximum Okada. The producer for Maquia originally suggested her taking up the director's role to create something that was 100% her vision, and boy has that decision born some weird ass fruit here. Be warned, folks: this movie is like diving headfirst into the open ocean if you haven't already inoculated yourself to Okada's quirks as a creator.

However, ten years ago, I would be shocked to believe my excitement for a Mari Okada work since I wasn't always a fan of hers! Being a writer with a unique voice and a prolific one that has its highs and lows. Having worked on many adaptations, collaborations, and originals throughout her career, her words have touched and burned the hearts of many anime fans. If you've been anywhere in the anime sphere in the past two decades, you've likely experienced one of Okada's stories.
Yeah, Okada has a fascinating history within fandom consciousness. It's already rather rare for a screenwriter to become a well-known name within fandom, but the sheer volume of her output, combined with the often loud and volatile ideas at play in her most personal works, gave her a very divisive reputation back in the day. Though you wouldn't necessarily know it based on the sheer breadth and number of titles she's written.
It's impressive her work stands out as much as it does. It's hard for an anime writer to stand out in the first place, as their job is to be kind of invisible. Still, Okada has a particular knack for character drama and human themes that it's sometimes impossible not to notice, even when she's just doing regular script work.
Even she's pretty upfront about whether something she's writing for is her vision. While we like to think of the person credited with series composition as the singular writer, it's just as common for directors, producers, or original creators to have a more considerable say in the creative direction of work than the person putting words to paper. For instance, Okada said that her main contribution to Aquarion EVOL was to add in more dirty jokes, a valiant contribution, but far from the dominant creative voice.
Yeah, so despite having a lot of work that's high-profile, like Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans and The Woman Called Fujiko Mine, it can sometimes be hard to sus out the quality of a singular writer. There are a lot of anime writers I find "questionable" at times, but occasionally, even they can pump out something I love. However, in the industry, the thing that matters most is that you're reliable and easy to work with. So, I somewhat wrongly assumed this was the case with Mari Okada for a while.
It also helps if you make a big hit for Aniplex in the early 2010s that not only jumpstarts your chance to create original stories but also consistently collaborate with a director who loves working with you. This is partially why Okada herself marks Anohana as her first credit that was really "hers" in a meaningful sense.

It's also where she first got her reputation for making viewers cry like babies.
Anohana was very popular with kids at my high school; dramas do pretty well with vast swaths of anime-watching youth, and so Anohana and her work on Toradora is part of why Okada was quick to blip up on viewers maps. Okada knows how to capture the messiness of adolescence. However, I was too busy experiencing my messy adolescence to check it out.
Anohana is probably the most conventional of her originals, but that makes it a good onboarding production. There's some weird left-field stuff in there, but it mostly follows the expected paths of a young adult drama, tackling feelings of grief and survivor's guilt from different angles with its cast. Compared to later works, there's only like, a sprinkling of psycho-sexual hang-ups mixed in for seasoning.

That's one way to say, "The grownup ghost of my dead childhood crush just gave me the most metaphysically confusing boner imaginable," Jintan.
Building off Anohana's hype, I did end up checking out the 2016 Kiznaiver in hopes of becoming a Mari Okada believer, as an already fan of studio Trigger, but it failed to evangelize me. As a character drama with a sci-fi twist, Kiznaiver shares a similar messiness, but it mostly left a cynical taste in my mouth, and the characters came off as unlikeable to me, despite having excellent character designs provided by Shirow Miwa. So, at the time, I was left wondering if Mari Okada was for me.
Kiznaiver is an interesting beast. On the surface, it's very similar to the kinds of stories Okada was known for at the time, yet there's a distinct sense of sterility to its emotions. The concept of experiencing another person's pain to re-awaken your own suppressed feelings is definitely in her wheelhouse, but it's surprisingly limp when it gets down to it. Also, none of the girls in the cast is a stubbornly misguided instigator harboring unbridled self-loathing, which tells you this is Store-Brand Mari at best.
Though, at the time, that would've been impossible to know. Later, I would also check out the gritty Lupin III spin-off The Woman Called Fujiko Mine. Mari Okada and Sayo Yamamoto together made such a powerful combo in this re-imagining of anime's most infamous femme fatale. Never in my life could I think an anime could hold such raw feminine power, thanks to their creative voices as women working in the industry.
Only those two would have the courage to make a Lupin story where Zenigata canonically fucks, I'll tell ya that much.
Though, at the time, much of Fujiko Mine was accredited to Yamamoto. She has the power to portray women with strong sexuality, but some of those dirty jokes have the Okada stamp on them. Okada started as a direct-to-video porn writer, as revealed in her memoirs, so sex is a critical aspect of Okada's work. However, having two strong voices together didn't completely solve my "Schroidinger's Mari Okada" problem.
I think the main difference comes down to how they each approach the topic. Yamamoto is a lot more, well, sensual with her portrayal of sex. It's moody and intense and meant to at least partially get the audience in on the moment. Okada tends to be much less romantic about it, portraying sexual attraction with a comedic awkwardness that is liable to make you cringe out of your skin.
That's why I'm so thankful O Maidens in Your Savage Season exists. Okada also authored the manga, so O Maidens is 100% Mari Okada. Following a group of girls from the same school literature club, O Maidens is an honest and embarrassingly real story about teen sexuality, which is pretty rare for girls, given how most sex comedies are from the male perspective.
Honestly, it's rare for either end of the gender binary. Most dude-aimed sex comedies are ultimately fantasies, with little to say about the nature of sexual awakening outside of some boner jokes. Okada, meanwhile, infuses those boner jokes with a certain amount of pathos, recognizing that sex can be comical, joyous, uncomfortable, empowering, or embarrassing, sometimes all at the same time, and communicating that through the characters' fumbling journey through the topic. There are also just some beautiful visual metaphors.
I agree, and in the end, the whole cast is likable in that it is sympathetic to their teenage frustrations and fumblings without condemning them. The girls are all flawed but well-rounded characters. There are a lot of elements that could be considered "problematic" by some folks, like the uncomfortable extended plotline of one of the characters chatting online with someone who turns out to be her teacher. However, it's all done with a nuance that makes it palatable and humanized. It's able to capture that juvenile mindset while being mature about it.
That's really what makes Okada's work feel special to me. She gets that teenagers are imperfect, impulsive little gremlins who will often make bad decisions but are rarely judgmental about them. It's more like somebody looking back honestly on their adolescence and cringe-laughing at their own mistakes endearingly. You may just have to learn to swing with some more intense narrative choices, like a teenager trying to blackmail her teacher into popping her cherry so she can learn to write better porn.
Also, that doesn't just apply to straight sexuality. O Maidens and Kiznaiver's approach to sapphism might as well be night and day.
That's not even getting into whatever the hell was going on with Oscar in Fujiko Mine. It kind of dovetails with Atsumu crossdressing as Menma in Anohana...hold on, I have to go add some more red string to my conspiracy board.
It is worth noting she also worked on the fantastic anime adaption for the already amazing Wandering Son. Still, yeah, there's a wealth of issues that come up with her work, not just romance or identity, but familial issues also play a big role in many of her works. In fact, this is the central theme of her previously stated debut, Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms, which focuses on a long-lived young mother who adopts a human son after her home is attacked.
I've already gone on at length about how much that movie socked me in the jaw, but that subject of family is especially striking after reading Okada's memoir, From Truant to Anime Screenwriter: "My Path to Anohana" and "The Anthem of the Heart." To keep it succinct, Okada has a...complicated relationship with her own family, and knowing that makes Maquia's theme of the family woven into the story of our lives for better or worse hit even harder.
Being able to write a believably heart-warming family story is tough if you don't have a loving family yourself. That's part of Maquia's character arc as well, who wasn't raised by a family to begin with.
I think it's also a matter of being willing and able to portray nastier sides of people, too. A lot of characters in Okada's work do stuff that would be easily and understandably vilified in many other stories, but they're often presented as, if not sympathetic, then at least human in their faults. It's why, even though A Whisker Away is probably my least favorite of the movies she's written, I still appreciate how raw and intense the family strife in it can be.
It's worth noting that while Okada has only directed two films, she's written many others as part of her regular work.

I would mention A Whisker Away as one of her pleasant but ultimately average works. The premise of turning into a cat to get closer to the boy you are crushing on seems to come straight from a Ghibli movie, but it's overall a fine but unambitious outing for Okada. However, it's harder to assess all of her movies and works because she's done a lot, and for films in particular, they don't always get licensed for streaming or brought over. I don't believe we ever got Her Blue Sky, which featured a lot of Anohana staff under the name "Super Peace Busters." Though we did get The Anthem of the Heart, it is only for rent.
Lord, do not remind me. Do you know how goddamn salty I am that we haven't gotten the music-focused Mari Okada movie over here? With the time-traveling love quadrangle? I don't know who I have to brain with a bass guitar, but I will El Kabong them into oblivion to get that movie over here.
On that front, I'm thankful that we were able to get MABOROSHI so "soon" and easily available thanks to its distribution deal with Netflix. Though it was released in Sept 2023 in Japan, I'm a bit disappointed there wasn't more hype or a theater release. Like Maquia, it's got some great visuals.
My god does it. Where Maquia portrays a vibrant and beautiful fantasy setting, MABOROSHI is all about the surreal and supernatural combined with the smothering mundanity of a city of industry on the decline. It's gorgeous, horrifying, and painfully familiar for anyone living in a town whose best days are behind it. I especially love how the lighting captures the isolation of the Mifuse itself.
MABOROSHI is about a small town suddenly cut off from time and space after a mysterious incident at the nearby factory. Seasons stop changing, and people don't age. Yet the townsfolk are told they should not panic and accept this occurrence, going about their daily lives as usual, isolated from the outside world. This sounds fine and dandy until you remember that some people have to go on being 14 until god-knows-when and possibly the end of eternity, with nowhere else to go. (Spoiler: It was NOT fine.)
It's by far the highest concept of anything Okada's tackled so far and indicative of how out there this movie gets with its own story. Like, I am a dedicated Okada Appreciator with a decade of defending and explaining her weirder choices under my belt, and I still had to spend a few hours staring into the middle distance to wrap my head around this one. If I tried to explain the basic plot points of this thing to somebody, they would either think I was lying or would slowly start to back away once I explained the mechanics of the central love triangle.
On the broader stroke level, I feel like much of the town is cut off from reality. The way characters are discouraged from growing or changing drastically, at the point of their lives where growth and change are necessary, is a larger metaphor for breaking the status quo in a small town that's dying. The only source of income is the factory, which will eventually die out, as is the fate of many company towns. Keeping the factory in business is a big part of the overall plot, despite how much detriment it brings to the townspeople to keep it going.

Then, on a character level, like have you ever been cuckolded from dating the not-real teen version of your dad by the not-real teen version of your mom? No? Thought so.
There is...a lot going on here. Okada's always had a knack for taking powerful and relatable emotions and packaging them into some wild interpersonal relationships, but the way MABOROSHI goes about it is bonkers. You'll have these intense scenes of characters breaking apart under the pressure of their eternal stasis, begging for release from the ethereal gods that have trapped them in a total unreality:


And then, like 5 minutes later, the feral girl who lives in the steel mill's boiler room is drinking our protagonist's tears like a dog.
I would shatter into tiny little pieces, too, if I had to be stuck in a shell of raging hormones and told to stay that way. I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemies.

However, a good chunk of the film is centered on the mysterious hostage of a mysterious young girl who traveled in and was kept at the factory, catalyzing the incident.

It all ultimately serves as the central metaphor of feeling trapped and unable to change oneself. It's just that there's a lot of noise to work through and some bizarre ways of going about it all that make it way more obtuse than anything Okada's penned before now. It's terrifying to think that everything before this was her holding back. It's like Goku revealing Super Saiyan 3 but with an interdimensional pseudo-incest.
This is also part of why I'm a bit mixed about it. I'm not sure if it'll be for everyone. It has a lot of similarities to classic fantasy and sci-fi, but with the focus on the characters, much of the world-building is vague. I enjoyed the vibes of Maquia better, but both films portray these kinds of unbelievable situations beyond imagination. It's clear that Okada hasn't always been able to explore things to their fullest because they both hold this ability to portray small-scale stories while revealing away at bits of a wider one.
At the same time, I appreciate that messiness a lot. It's weird and flawed, but also ambitious in a way Makoto Shinkai and his many imitators just aren't. For instance, while the emotional metaphor of being trapped within an unchanging town would lead you to expect the characters to ultimately escape, it examines whether or not escape, or transformation, is necessary to change into a better or happier version of yourself.

Conceptually, I dig it. There are a lot of subtly sad and horrifying problems with the townspeople, like the eternally pregnant woman. However, I felt it could've used ten more minutes in the oven. Part of it is that I never really understood the character of Itsumi, who is way too childish for me to consider much of a character. However, the relationship between her two would-be parents, who are more knowledgeable about their situation than other people, and struggling between their feelings of love-hate and being puppets of fate is delicious.
They are certainly something, alright.

Granted, I'd also be a dysfunctional mess of contradictions if I was stuck processing a middle school crush for what has to be like 30 years at this point, too.
Though, frankly, that part is a bit difficult to get across. It's not clear how time feels within the town. That kiss WAS pretty phenomenal, though, so can you blame him? It's the most passionate 7-Eleven parking lot make-out ever to be animated.

Moments-wise, this is a great movie to watch, and I think most people will enjoy it just in that aspect. As you said, a lot of movies struggle to have that kind of ambition for emotionality that even a not-my-favorite but heartfelt film is better than something cleaner with fewer high notes. I'd rather watch MABOROSHI ten times over A Whisker Away.
It is an acquired taste and likely going to shock some systems if you haven't spent an inordinate amount of time vibing to Okada's wavelength as I have. Yet that excites me to see what she works on after this and how much weirder her next romance can get.

After all, Okada and I have been through it, and I can confidently say she earns her acclaim. I'm no longer questioning her abilities, and now I'm glad she can be this confident yet personable voice working to make new things and take risks. Even if they don't always land with me, I'm guaranteed to get something interesting out of it.

I think it also shows a lot of maturity over time on my part as an anime viewer that I'm more willing to forgive creators and keep trying with them, rather than scorn them. Maybe it's me who should be asking Mari Okada for forgiveness.

I'm just glad you have finally seen the light and are ready to join us. I extend that invitation to everyone reading this! Let the Super Peace Busters into your life, allow the tears to flow, and embrace Her power. One of us. One Of Us. ONE OF US.
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