Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms

Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms (2018) is a Japanese fantasy anime you can watch online on iFILM. Maquia belongs to the Iorph, a people who live for centuries without aging and spend their days weaving cloth that records the passing of time.

When a king's army storms her homeland to seize the secret of long life, she flees alone into the forest and finds a baby boy orphaned in the ruins of a slaughtered village. She names him Ariel and chooses to raise him as her own. From there time does the cruel thing the immortal always feared: the child grows up, becomes a young man, then a father himself, while Maquia stays exactly as she was. A mother forever younger than her son sits at the heart of this story.

It marks the directorial debut of Mari Okada, the screenwriter behind Anohana and Attack on Titan, animated by P.A. Works with a score by Kenji Kawai. Quiet and quietly devastating, it treats love and loss as the same feeling stretched across a lifetime. Stream Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms (2018) online on iFILM.