Anime Review: The Vision of Escaflowne (天空のエスカフロネ)

Curious to know why I started learning Japanese? It’s all thanks to an anime called The Vision of Escaflowne. This wasn’t the very first anime I’d ever seen; Pokemon had taken the US by storm and brought with it a host of shows that could be edited and dubbed for American children. We had Digimon, Monster Rancher, Flint the Time Detective and more. Even as teenagers, we flocked to these shows, as they were just different from what we were used to.

Escaflowne was one such show. Originally meant for teenagers, Fox Kids decided it would somehow be possible to dub and edit the show to appeal to boys aged 6-12. I won’t get into how insane of an idea that turned out to be, because although they did a hack job of it, this was my introduction to an amazing anime.

It went suddenly off the air, or perhaps changed to a new time slot that I wasn’t privy to, about midway through the show, leaving me longing for more. I turned online and found a fan site (there were no social media groups for specific shows the way there is now) that extensively compared the original Japanese to the awful Fox edit. This was the first time I realized just how much anime could be changed when it arrived on our US TV screens.

I did something I’d never done before. I emailed the guy who ran the site and asked, “Should I get the sub or dub?” His response was that both were good, but the original voices and dialogue were still a bit better.

My fate was sealed at that moment. In exchange for purchasing the subbed version of the show on VHS, I promised my mother that I would wash the dishes for a month! It was completely worth it!

I was hooked on the show from episode one, a rare feat for any show! I was soon drawn into the same strange world that our protagonist, Hitomi, was. As I began picking up bits of Japanese vocabulary, I’d decided on about my second run-through of the 26 episodes show that I was going to master this new language and be able to watch without any assistance at all.

This isn’t just how I decided to learn Japanese (and as I learned more about Japan and started talking with Japanese people, this helped my motivation a lot), it was how I caught the language bug in general. I can’t imagine ever stopping learning a language now, even if I never learn most of them to the level that I learned Japanese, and I’m still constantly improving my Japanese.

This anime still holds a special place in my heart. It holds up extremely well, even now that I’ve left my teenage years far behind me and have immersed myself in the fantastic worlds of so many other anime. I can’t wait to share it with you all!

Plot

The plot seems strange at first. A high school girl who’s into Tarot Cards and fortune-telling learns that the upperclassman she has a crush on is moving abroad. Both of them being on the track team, she makes a bet with him that if she can beat her sprinting record, he should give her her first kiss.

The bet is on, so she, Amano (the upperclassman), and another friend of hers get together to see if she can beat her record time. Unfortunately, a dragon suddenly appears out of nowhere, along with a sword-wielding boy who seems solely focused on slaying this dragon.

Upon slaying said dragon, the boy is confronted by a very bewildered Hitomi. Before he has a chance to explain, the two of them are transported to a world called Gaea, where the Earth hangs among the stars in the night sky and is only known to the natives as the Mystic Moon.

On Gaea, Hitomi is drawn into its politics and the war that seems to have enveloped the whole planet.

It sounds strange, but trust me, it’s a fantastic story, filled with characters you’ll love dearly.

Characters

This thing was Game of Thrones before Game of Thrones! Well, before the HBO adaptation, anyway. The characters really drive this story, and we can easily see the corruption in the protagonists as well as the righteousness in the villains. They’re complex, driven by their own desires and motivations, and also so easy to relate to, love, and hate all at once.

Hitomi serves as the audience’s avatar, naturally. She’s an Earthling who’s been sucked into a world that’s culturally vastly different from her own. She reacts in the way we would, an outsider thrust into a war we have no stake in. This trope has been done to death, but it feels so fresh here.

It also helps that Hitomi is more than just the person who reacts to the strangeness around her. She has some mild psychic abilities, making her a useful tool. In fact, it’s the fact that so many characters want to use her as a means to their own ends that makes her struggle so palpable and real, even as she herself develops favoritism and even romantic feelings for some of them.

Other characters include Van, the young prince of a kingdom called Fanelia (it’s always a breath of fresh air when someone is introduced to a new planet and it isn’t run by a single governing entity) who suddenly appeared on her planet, fighting a dragon.

Van has a little cat-girl friend called Merl, but before you roll your eyes, this character isn’t here for sex appeal or to make furries wet themselves with glee. She’s very childlike, not that attractive, and starts off as quite annoying.

There’s another prince named Allen, as well as his fiancee. Your mileage with these characters, particularly Allen, may vary. You’ll either like him a lot or find him “meh”.

On the villain side, we have the idealist Folken and the absolutely psychotic Dilandau. I won’t go into them, because spoilers would run rampant, but these are villains that are impossible to really hate. Dilandau in particular is so delightfully insane, yet so unfathomably tragic, that you can’t help but feel he’s one of anime’s best villains.

I’m not going to go into any other characters. Trust me, you want to watch this show and experience them for yourself.

Art

This is a breathtaking anime with some gorgeous artwork and animation. Back in the day when everything was done by hand, you can see the care put into every detail presented here. Each cell is hand-painted, and there’s a human touch here that you just don’t see anymore.

That’s not to say that I hate computer assistance in animation because I don’t. As an indie game developer who is usually not the best artist (I prefer the programming side), I’m thankful for tools like Photoshop, Blender, etc. It’s always nice to see a good-looking show that was done slowly and entirely by the human hand, however.

Music

I think I insisted on owning the entire soundtrack, and I still have it. Yoko Kanno is easily one of anime’s best composers (along with Yuki Kajiura, that is) and she shines here. I’ve even heard bits of the Escaflowne soundtrack used on other shows, such as the original Iron Chef.

This music isn’t what you would expect from an anime, it’s what you’d expect from a major motion picture. I’ll just show you some of this fantastic music.

Do I Recommend It?

Can’t you tell? Yes! If you’ve never seen this show, you must. Period. Go find it right now and give it a whirl. I promise you won’t regret it. I could go on and on about this show, but I’ll stop now and let you take it in.