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(Author’s note: All images are taken from the TV series
for comedy’s sake. The movie
doesn’t contain anything quite so obnoxious as the series’ character
designs.)
I really can’t talk about Escaflowne: The Movie, aka Escaflowne:
A Girl in Gaea without first discussing the highly acclaimed television
series from Shoji Kawamori (Robotech).
Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat: I really. REALLY. Do not like the
TV series. It’s annoying and
bothersome in many, many ways, not least of which is the inexplicable
praise it’s somehow garnered among anime fans and enthusiasts of romantic
fantasy alike. I am also well aware of the fact that I seem
to be the only anime fan alive who feels this way. Trying to explain to a fan why Escaflowne is a painfully
typical series is like trying to tell a fundamentalist Christian that
no, the biscuit doesn’t really turn into flesh when you eat it.
For
the benefit of the uninitiated, The Vision of Escaflowne is a
twenty-something-episode anime television series in which Hitomi, a
flat, uninteresting shoujo heroine, is pulled into Gaea, a world we’ve
seen a thousand times before in a thousand different classical fantasies,
after she witnesses the slaying of a dragon by Van, the warrior prince
of Fanelia. Hitomi soons discovers that everyone in Gaea
is in deep shit due to the ambitions of the Zaibach Empire, under the
leadership of Emperor Dornkirk and his subordinate Folken, who is both
a ridiculous goth and Van’s older brother.
Things transpire as expected.
A romance develops between Hitomi and Van, and is complicated
by the introduction of Allen Schezar, another rogue warrior who closely
resembles Charlotte from Samurai Shodown.
Battles are fought, both on foot and in Guymelefs, Escaflowne’s
unique and superbly designed mecha.
It’s simply nothing new. We’ve seen it all before, and we’ve seen it
done better in other anime. Record
of Lodoss War springs to mind.
In fact the only notable aspects of Escaflowne are some
halfway decent production values and an outstanding musical score by
Yoko Kanno (Cowboy Bebop, Macross Plus).
The rest is a mishmash of fantasy clichés and shoujo nonsense.
The
film changes things a bit. Hitomi
is given a bit more depth. She’s
doing badly in school, and she’s depressed to the point of suicide. When her passage to Gaea comes by way of a vision of Folken (now
a David Bowie look-alike and sole ruler of the Zaibach Empire), it is
a welcome release. However,
the Van she encounters here is far more savage and violent than he was
in the TV series, and his initial reaction is one of suspicion.
This makes for a far more interesting (read: not romantic) relationship
between the two. Most characters
from the series are given minor roles, with the exception of the series’
psychotic antagonist Dilandau, who, of course, comes with his own army
of androgynous boys so he can smack them around for the gratification
of any yaoi enthusiasts who might be watching.
Escaflowne: The Movie boasts some excellent music and
some breathtaking animation. The character designs are much less obnoxious,
and the series’ pretense of a plot has wisely been ditched in favor
of more and better action sequences.
On the other hand, they’ve left out the series’ one and only
interesting character – Emperor Dornkirk, who was really only interesting
because of his true identity, revealed in passing in one of the series’
final episodes. I’ve heard people say of this film that you
can’t compress twenty-six episodes of plot into a ninety-minute movie. In my opinion the series attempted to stretch
out enough plot to fill ninety minutes into twenty-six episodes, and
failed miserably where the movie, to some extent, succeeds. Nonetheless, you can’t make gold from crap,
and, while entertaining and pretty, Escaflowne: The Movie is
ultimately unremarkable when compared to other classics of the genre.
Doom
gives Escaflowne: The Movie FIVE OUT OF TEN CURSES TO RICHARDS!
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