There are MINOR SPOILERS in this review.
I can't state enough how much I adore this TV series.
Escaflowne is an extremely moving fantasy series with very deep, complex characters and an emphasis on emotion. The production values were first rate. At the time this was made, this had the highest quality animation of any TV anime made to date. The music, by Yoko Kanno (with some additional stuff done by her husband Hajime Mizoguchi), is amazing, and on par with most Oscar nominated film scores. Yoko Kanno is one of the top three or so film and television composers in Japan, and this is one of her best work. The orchestral pieces were even recorded using the Warsaw Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra.
The story involves a girl named Hitomi in modern day Japan who gets sucked into another universe, the world of Gaea, after which she quickly gets caught up in the intrigue of an ever expanding empire and the kingdoms that are still resisting being conquered, and falls into a love triangle. It sounds like a collection of clichés, but its pulled off so beautifully that they're hardly noticeable as clichés.
That being said its not all perfect. The ending is kind of rushed; Some of the character designs are a bit bizarre. Unfortunately this includes the lead, Hitomi; The ending theme, "Mystic Eyes" by Wada Hiroki, is horrible and is everything that was wrong with J-Pop at the time (although thankfully not used in the final episode). The younger cat-girl character, Merle, can be kind of annoying.
Still, this is a tremendously moving TV show with broad appeal that deserved much better than the butchering Fox Kids gave to it. It is not particularly appropriate for kids. There's little in the way of sex (although one of the cat twins jokingly makes a pass at her sister), a fair amount of violence (much of it involving giant medieval robots called guymelefs, but also several scenes of mass battlefield death, including a stunning sequence involving something similar to a nuclear bomb, that is treated with appropriate gravitas), and other things that will either bore some kids (romantic tension and love triangles), or go right over their heads (i.e. a brainwashed character who also occasionally switches between genders; the use of "luck" as a changeable force of nature instead of a matter of fixed mathematical probability). Unfortunately, despite the fact that Fox Kids only aired 9 episodes of the series before canceling it, they had acquired the U.S. television rights for five years, and they only recently became available again. The fact that Saban replaced most of Yoko Kanno's score so they could use music from their own crappy music department and charge Fox for doing so, is despicable. Hopefully Cartoon Network will pick it up now and put it on its Adult Swim programming block, where it'd be done justice.
I know this review/commentary is about the TV series, but I'd like to dispel some misconceptions about the movie. It is not a sequel to the TV series. Escaflowne The Movie is a 're-imagining' of the TV series, in a way that Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes is a "re-imagining" of the original movie. While beautifully animated, with improved character designs and all-around awesome production values, the movie is nearly incomprehensible if you haven't seen the TV series, and is hard to decipher at times even if you have, which is a rather unfortunate trait for a piece of art that is supposed to be able to stand on its own.
This review is just for the original, subtitled version. Supposedly the dub as a whole is so-so, but I've seen too little of the dubbed version to really comment on it.
Anyway, I highly, highly recommend this series, as its just an amazing piece of art, that deserves much wider exposure than its gotten in the U.S. (or the rest of the English speaking world for that matter). It's hard to really reduce something like this to a numerical rating, but I'd say it's about a 9.5/10.
I can't state enough how much I adore this TV series.
Escaflowne is an extremely moving fantasy series with very deep, complex characters and an emphasis on emotion. The production values were first rate. At the time this was made, this had the highest quality animation of any TV anime made to date. The music, by Yoko Kanno (with some additional stuff done by her husband Hajime Mizoguchi), is amazing, and on par with most Oscar nominated film scores. Yoko Kanno is one of the top three or so film and television composers in Japan, and this is one of her best work. The orchestral pieces were even recorded using the Warsaw Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra.
The story involves a girl named Hitomi in modern day Japan who gets sucked into another universe, the world of Gaea, after which she quickly gets caught up in the intrigue of an ever expanding empire and the kingdoms that are still resisting being conquered, and falls into a love triangle. It sounds like a collection of clichés, but its pulled off so beautifully that they're hardly noticeable as clichés.
That being said its not all perfect. The ending is kind of rushed; Some of the character designs are a bit bizarre. Unfortunately this includes the lead, Hitomi; The ending theme, "Mystic Eyes" by Wada Hiroki, is horrible and is everything that was wrong with J-Pop at the time (although thankfully not used in the final episode). The younger cat-girl character, Merle, can be kind of annoying.
Still, this is a tremendously moving TV show with broad appeal that deserved much better than the butchering Fox Kids gave to it. It is not particularly appropriate for kids. There's little in the way of sex (although one of the cat twins jokingly makes a pass at her sister), a fair amount of violence (much of it involving giant medieval robots called guymelefs, but also several scenes of mass battlefield death, including a stunning sequence involving something similar to a nuclear bomb, that is treated with appropriate gravitas), and other things that will either bore some kids (romantic tension and love triangles), or go right over their heads (i.e. a brainwashed character who also occasionally switches between genders; the use of "luck" as a changeable force of nature instead of a matter of fixed mathematical probability). Unfortunately, despite the fact that Fox Kids only aired 9 episodes of the series before canceling it, they had acquired the U.S. television rights for five years, and they only recently became available again. The fact that Saban replaced most of Yoko Kanno's score so they could use music from their own crappy music department and charge Fox for doing so, is despicable. Hopefully Cartoon Network will pick it up now and put it on its Adult Swim programming block, where it'd be done justice.
I know this review/commentary is about the TV series, but I'd like to dispel some misconceptions about the movie. It is not a sequel to the TV series. Escaflowne The Movie is a 're-imagining' of the TV series, in a way that Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes is a "re-imagining" of the original movie. While beautifully animated, with improved character designs and all-around awesome production values, the movie is nearly incomprehensible if you haven't seen the TV series, and is hard to decipher at times even if you have, which is a rather unfortunate trait for a piece of art that is supposed to be able to stand on its own.
This review is just for the original, subtitled version. Supposedly the dub as a whole is so-so, but I've seen too little of the dubbed version to really comment on it.
Anyway, I highly, highly recommend this series, as its just an amazing piece of art, that deserves much wider exposure than its gotten in the U.S. (or the rest of the English speaking world for that matter). It's hard to really reduce something like this to a numerical rating, but I'd say it's about a 9.5/10.