Maboroshi (2025), is essentially about a tiny Japanese village of the rapidly-disappearing-in-reality type, timelessly preserved in a dream dimension. The residents must either live without changing, aging or even hoping to leave, or else accept personal annihilation as their unreal town and it's people literally break apart.
The idea that to change is to die is false in at least one important sense; the young people vanishing from Japan's rural ghost towns are not dead, or even spiritually consumed by those horrible, godless cities. We would hope most of them are doing their best, somewhere they can choose their careers, spouses and best lives, as opposed to jobless, hopeless country villages that are places of wonder for the kids in Non Non Biyori, but hell with one exit for young adults who want anything else. The conviction that unthinkable ruin is the sole alternative to the way things are, or were, is the preserver of outdated industry, soul-destroying custom and the patriarchal monstrosity, backed by sinister superstition, which fill the countryside with more oppression and abuse than the despised city. Maboroshi's crazed Shintoist priest, forced into an absurd vocation by his family and imprisoning an innocent girl for years, draws it quite mildly for a fiction - but the darkness of bucolic nostalgia is relevant to every country that has a country - especially the one where hillbillies and unemployed steelworks elected an orange criminal to kill 200,000 people a month with aid cuts.
Change is death for some, however - the town in Maboroshi is centred around a failing steel mill and the troubles of its unemployed workers, perhaps even more relevant to blighted Blighty than Japan, would have made a better heart for the film than yet another teen romance. The aforementioned crazy priest, devoted with the steelworkers to keeping time stopped, has similarly invested his identity in an obsolete trade - albeit the job forced on him by a family whose traditions make abuse an institution has always consisted of spouting lies and abusing girls. The steelworker who wants to stay in the time bubble until his brother's widow says 'yes', when she's told him 'no', is actually not much better. The implication of nobly hopeless romance in clinging to failed industry and a woman who's just not into him is a grave mistake, not only on the anime's part.
With every possible respect for the troubles of unemployed industrial workers, they deserve better than toxic nostalgia and hopeless identification with jobs that no longer exist, better than being needlessly discarded without support by industry and government - much better than a film that pays them brief and superficial tribute without really understanding that change is life for steelworkers as well.
'Change is life' is actually the nominal message of the film - the teenage leads come to realise that they can fall in love, even in a timeless village, and resolve to make such changes as they want. Even if they will never grow up, their neverland town will never become a city of dreams, and the film shows us nowhere but the tiny, dying village, which it celebrates without giving it a single admirable quality other than beautiful animation. You can't change without losing something - steel mills, small villages, childhood - but Maboroshi tries to grow up without growing up, have its cake while eating it, and celebrate both nostalgia and progress with barely the most superficial attempt at resolving their contradictions. It's difficult to represent the significance of essentially Buddhist spiritual truths such as 'reality is illusion' when your sole religious authority figure is a mad idiot. Yet it is such a vital and essentially human struggle to have our cake and eat it that even a basic and superficial film on this subject was worth watching and blogging about. The animation was lovely too, and even the teen romance unusually intense and touching in itself. There's simply other worthy themes to make anime about than that.
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