Mari Okada’s Maboroshi Coming to Netflix in January

Initially advertised as Alice and Therese’s Illusion Factory, Maboroshi has always been something of a mystery, but the biggest mystery since its premiere has been “Where’s the international release?” Where fans expected Eleven Arts or GKIDS to announce a theatrical release, they were met with silence until Netflix announced they’d be bringing it to their service on January 15.

It was strange that it took this long as this is a film by screenwriter and now two-time director Mari Okada, whose directorial debut in 2018, Maquia, was beloved by critics and audiences. Just as her previous film was an examination of life through the eyes of a girl who is practically immortal, Okada’s new film is similarly focused on time, in a town where it is frozen.

A Town Frozen in Time

Maboroshi follows Masamune Kikuiri, a 14-year-old boy whose town is changed forever after a strange explosion occurs, isolating the town from the rest of Japan. The seasons don’t change and neither do the town’s citizens, meaning Masamune will never grow up. It’s through this lens that Okada paints a portrait of life in grim and horrifying stagnation.

Things change when Masamune is led by his classmate, Mutsumi Sagami, to a factory where a mysterious and wild young girl roams, whom they decide to watch over. Feelings develop between the characters, which only seems to complicate things more, as the supernatural isolation the town has found itself in seems to respond to their emotions. A recurring theme of the trailers is the idea that, as the tagline suggests, “The urge to fall in love will destroy the world.”

The Staff

Okada is joined by two other directors for the film: Jun Shishido and Shuuhei Yabuta. Shishido recently worked on Attack on Titan The Final Season and even directed To The Abandoned Sacred Beasts. Yabuta should be familiar to Vinland Saga fans as he served as the director of seasons 1 and 2 at both WIT Studio and MAPPA.

She is also joined by Tadashi Hiramatsu as the assistant director. He has worked with Okada in the past on Maquia as a storyboard artist, character designer, and animation director, among other roles. He’s had an expansive career besides, working on Gurren Lagann, Evangelion, Yuri on Ice, and most recently on Jujutsu Kaisen.

The film’s main theme is sung by Miyuki Nakajima, which was appropriately treated as a big selling point for the film, given her status as one of Japan’s most illustrious songwriters. As for the film’s score, it was composed by Masaru Yokoyama, famous for such soundtracks as Fate/Apocrypha, Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans, Mashle, and Yurusei Yatsura (2022).

Maboroshi did not have the most successful opening in Japan, ranking #8 on its opening weekend, though it was received well by critics. Anime News Network gave it an A-, praising it as a “surreal thought experiment” that dives “deeply into human nature.” It currently has a 6.82 on MyAnimeList, though that is subject to change once the film is fully released internationally.

Mari Okada is an extraordinarily prolific writer, but one whose claim to fame is a source of criticism given how she writes melodrama. In the case of Maboroshi, the film’s presentation alone is dripping with angst from just the trailers, and those who have seen it have expressed confusion in the face of the large scope of the story’s message. Whether her new film is as successful as her first will have to be discovered on January 15 when Maboroshi hits Netflix.

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Source: Twitter/X (@NetflixAnime), Crunchyroll