Time caught in a steel trap: a review of Mabaroshi

Mabaroshi

Maboroshi (アリスとテレスのまぼろし工場, Arisu to Teresu no Maboroshi Kōjō,  ’Alice and Therese’s Illusory Factory’)

Directed by Mari Okada & Seimei Kidokoro[a]

Written by Mari Okada

Produced by Manabu Otsuka

Starring

Character Japanese voice English voice

Masamune Kikuiri Junya Enoki Max Mittelman

Mutsumi Sagami Reina Ueda Jeannie Tirado

Itsumi Misaki Kuno Kitana Turnbull

Akimune Kikuiri Kōji Seto Robbie Daymond

Tokimune Kikuiri Kento Hayashi Isaac Robinson-Smith

Daisuke Sasakura Taku Yashiro Jonathan Leon

Atsushi Nitta Tasuku Hatanaka David Errigo Jr.

Yasunari Senba Daiki Kobayashi Brandon Engman

Yūko Sonobe Ayaka Saitō Lizzie Freeman

Hina Hara Maki Kawase Valerie Rose Lohman

Reina Yasumi Yukiyo Fujii Madeline Dorroh

Mamoru Sagami Setsuji Satō Andrew Kishino

Cinematography Yuusuke Tannawa

Edited by Ayumu Takahashi

Music by Masaru Yokoyama

Production company: MAPPA

Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures (Japan, theatrical) & Netflix (worldwide)

Release date September 15, 2023

Running time 111 minutes

I’m not even sure why I clicked on Mabaroshi in the first place. Netflix described it as “bittersweet, romantic anime, first love” all of which are normally red flags. Most anime in this genre appear to be written by twelve-year-old boys who just noticed a classmate is wearing her first bra and are stuck awake all night anyway. Unwatchable, and leaves the viewer wondering, if this is typical of Japanese culture, how they ever reproduce in the first place.

And at first, it seems to be fairly grim. It’s about a group of 14-year-olds in a small coastal Japanese steelmill town where it’s constantly raining or snowing, and it’s difficult, at best, to figure out what’s going on.

What prompted me to stick with it was that the town, Mifuse, is in a general state of decay and neglect, rust and rot and overgrown weeds evident. The rich detail and the high quality of the artwork made me realize that someone had put a lot of work and love into this, unlike the bulk of school-blues anime that is subject to Sturgeon’s Law.

There’s a similar sense of ennui and angst amongst the kids, and it isn’t the sort of affected cynicism-posing-as-worldliness one often sees in that age group. One of the main characters, Masamune, wants to be an artist when he grows up, but complains he’ll never leave this podunk town—and never grow up.

Gradually the viewer realizes that this group of young teens have been young teens for some time—years, in fact. They, and the rest of the surviving town folk, have been stuck in a Groundhog Day type of time loop, where the same day recurs over and over. But while Bill Murrey was the only one cognizant of the loop, everyone in Mifuse is.

We gradually learn that there was a strange incident at the steel mill some seven years back, where the sky apparently shattered and vaporous dragon-like entities the town folk dubbed “smoke wolves” killed off a significant portion of the population—and still attack survivors on a sporadic basis.

There is no way in or out of the town. It has fallen into despair and disrepair, and a town crackpot has leveraged the situation into becoming something of a cult leader, preaching that the smoke wolves, which he calls “Sacred Wolves” must be worshiped and appeased.

So we’re meeting fourteen year old kids who have had seven years practice at being 14, and are pretty fed up with it. They are growing intellectually and in some skills (Masamune is improving as an artist even if it’s going nowhere) but they are stuck at age fourteen, with all the physical and emotional strife that accompanies that age.

There is one exception. Masamune discovers his love interest Mutsumi Sagami has been taking care of a young girl at the steel mill who seems to be aging in a town where no one has the ability to change any longer. She has been doing this since the girl was five (she is now about twelve or thirteen) at the behest of the town cult leader, who instinctively surmises she is somehow a threat to his singularity status quo. Completely cut off from all other human contact, the girl, Itsumi, is all but non-vocal and semi-feral. She exists outside the time loop but within the time loop and is somehow key.

The movie is sophisticated and wonderfully ambiguous. Along with the truly splendid artwork, there is a depth and sense of humanity in the characters that is seldom seen in movies in this soulless corporate age. It is something that only a small Japanese studio might produce.

Now on Netflix.