LONG POST INCOMING!
Vision Of Escaflowne (First Impressions. . .Kind've) :
I commented a while back about comparing "Twelve Kingdoms" to "Vision Of Escaflowne" and wrote how I thought they had a similar plot. An ordinary person from 'our world' being sucked into a fantasy world, ala Chronicles Of Narnia.
But then it dawned on me, I personally hadn't seen Escaflowne since I saw the edited bastardized version on Fox Kids alongside reruns of Digimon back when I was a toddler. I couldn't exactly comment on the series, having never actually seen the real unedited one.
So having a day off, and all my IRL friends being too busy with Christmas and Final Exam related things I decided to watch some of the real non-edited version. I asked myself "was it really good to begin with?" I confess when I looked this anime up again as a teen. I dismissed it with one look at it's Wikipedia plot synopsis, the plot sounded like the blurb from the back of a trashy romance novel.
"Girl from our modern world falls into a fantasy world through coincidence and falls in love with a mysterious swordwielding stranger."This is a plot that more often than not, just needs to die in a fire. Maybe the whole 'Twilight Fantasy Romance' Phenomenon just made me cynical and bitter towards the whole concept. So. . . I went into this anime knowing literally nothing about it, expecting to hate it knowing what little I did know.
Then I watched it, and I liked it . . . every time I finished an episode, I wanted to know
"what happened next"? and watched the next episode. Until I realized I had blown through quite a few of the Twenty something episodes, and decided to take a break.
So here I am now, talking to you all about it.
So I went in, fists clenched, and a 'My rage is ready!" attitude, believing I'd hate the characters and setting. But it won me over. Why?
The setting is just one part of it, and how it forges its own identity outside of the usual 'Tolkien-isms' a lot of other fantasy works in the same vein tend to do. True parts of it do bear resemblence to medieval england, but it goes out of its way to establish each nation as its own seperate culture, and
I really enjoy how they made the concept of 'mech suits' work in a fantasy universe. These alone would have differentiated the setting from most other fantasy anime in the same vein. The world does have its own form of technology and magic, although (at least so far) there aren't any wizards casting spells or turning people into toads. and it all makes sense. I really like how they make these ridiculous flying machines powered by giant floating rocks just attached to a wooden ship with metal clamps. Since the magic is limited it does add a certain sense of weight and reality to the setting that a lot of fantasy in this vein tend to lack.
The animation while good for its time, is still kind've limited, and parts of it have not aged well at all. It suffers from a few 'Eva-isms' in that regard. Often the animation will limit the amount of movement the characters have, only animating the mouth or panning over a still image of one character as another is talking, or re-using animation from several episodes previous. Also, while CGI isn't used much in this series, when it is. . . its really obvious. Since most nineties TV grade CGI was terrible.
While the obvious corner cutting in a few small parts does make parts of the show a bit hard to swallow. It allows for actual Choreography in the Sword fights and Magic-Mech fight scenes!
Also for once, an anime with
no gratuitous fanservice! . . . Sixteen episodes in, and there has been ONE panty-shot in the entire thing. In the first episode! and thats it! As a person who is often bugged by such things, its nice to find something that is trying to tell story rather than pandering to the Otaku with blatant fanservice. Remember when you could have sexual references and humor without showing the audience how well the studio could animate a womans body parts jiggling? Escaflowne does that!
What i think makes Escaflowne succeed where other fantasy properties with similar premises fail, is the inherently flawed and subversive nature of the characters. Each one of them fills an archetype you'd expect to find in a typical poorly written fantasy romance novel, but each one of them fills that archetype with something that subverts it and makes them their own characters with issues and history.
You've got Van the hotheaded prideful warrior prince, Allen the chivalrous and lawful Yin to Vans Yang, Princess Millerna the healer, Merle the mascot character, and our self insert character Hitomi. In the hands of lesser writers any one of them could have turned out terrible. But none of them did.
Van is a proud warrior prince with a huge responsibility and heroic destiny. But he has issues with his parents and his heritage, and with said responsibility despite choosing to accept it, and pays no small price and suffers no small amount of pain in an attempt to regain his country from the invaders.
Allen seems like an utterly perfect Male-Sue character right out of a bad romance novel at first. Turns out not only does he also have issues with his parents and more in common with Van than he would admit, he also
has an illegitimate child with an important ally's wife/friends sister and horrible guilt over it! You can just imagine the pain and regret he's going through when you see him sitting across the room, forbidden from interacting with his own son, the only thing he has left of the woman he loved!
You didn't actually watch the show did you? I put it in a spoiler for a reason. No sleep for you tonight.
Millerna, a character you wouldn't expect to develop. Also takes a huge leap in character development after she finds out about it. While not a 'deconstruction' it is neat to see how a woman who threw away her title for love develops after finding out about who the man she did it for really is inside. It does away with the trashy romance novel tropes rather nicely.
The weakest link in terms of characters however, is our self insert character Hitomi. But even then she's not a bad character! She's our self insert, so she doesn't really have much of a personality at first, a lot like an issue I had with Alto in Macross Frontier. But she does contribute to the story and the fight against the villains. So she's not entirely unecessary and just along for the ride. She does have issues and angst with being swept up from her own world into a darker fantasy one, but the series never really dwells on her angst. She has angst, but then adapts to her newfound situation in her own special way. That's perfectly okay sometimes, not every character is going to go from being an average Jane to Xena: Warrior Princess just because you throw them into a life or death situation, and she does have support from the beginning allowing her to keep her sanity and adapt without being afraid of being killed or enslaved within the first twenty minutes.
However outside of the main cast, the villains are not very interesting. Dastardly evil and enjoyable to see put down, but not very interesting.
EDIT: With maybe the exception of Evil Bastard Child Soldier Dilandau. I guess its just because we don't get much time with him that we don't really feel pity for him.
The dub is actually above par for its time. . .
okay, it's not Bebop-level of Quality. It's got imperfections, but
it has a certain warmth and character to it that a lot of modern dubs tend to lack. I think the reason I enjoy the dub is because of the way the actors choose to play the characters like they're actual characters in a movie or play, and not cartoons. Which is the reason a lot of dubs from that mixed-bag era of localization tended to fail. Too often the performances were hammy and over the top, and that has its place just not in most anime aimed at an older audience.
It also helps that the majority of voices involved aren't really, 'distinctive' voices. Often when a VA with a distinct voice gets an Iconic role, you tend to associate the voice with the character and it gets in the way of you relating to this new character he's playing. I don't think I need to say much about how Spike Spencer and Vic Mignogna have been the victims of extreme fan hate because of them playing someone other than Shinji and Edward respectively.
I also really enjoy how the company involved decided to recruit real children to play the roles of the younger characters like Sheed. It adds a sense of authenticity and emotional weight to the dub, especially considering how most children in anime these days are voiced by adult women. Although I do think the kid they cast for Dilandau sounds a bit too young for his character. He's supposed to be about sixteen I guess, and he sounds like a ten year old. Though even that does kind've work to the series advantage. Its really creepy seeing this older body and Vain, Vengeful attitude speak with a childs voice.
Anyways excellent: I may revise my judgement once I get to the end. But as of episode 16, Escaflowne gets from a hard to please fan like me, a solid
8/10
Trajan wrote:The series' reputation for killing off characters is a bit overblown. I mean, I guess it can be pretty traumatic if you're the kind that gets attached to supporting characters easily, but otherwise, your main cast still has pretty good plot armor.
