Escaflowne: The Movie (2002)

Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

The first must-see film of the year.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

I liked this movie mainly because even if it was separate from the anime it kept with a theme and was unpredictable. The movie didn't need to be accurate to the anime. But I would have preferred it to be more gritty and dark and a hint of Gothic. The movie had similarities to Evangelion, but other than those this movie was a pretty good example of how stories, books and TV shows should be adapted to a 2 hour movie. And I'm glad they didn't edit the movie to try to make it more of a kiddie adaption. They even kept most of the violence in the TV show on FOX KIDS. Anyway this movie was quite a beautiful masterpiece of mecha action and romance mixed with angst and pain. This movie enhanced the image of Escaflowne to something more dark and violent.

I first watched the series "The Vision of Escaflowne" and was impressed with the deep storyline and characters. Now understandably, it is difficult to take a 26 episode series and convert it into a 2 hour movie.The movie's storyline does not make much sense. Like the series, it is about a girl named Hitomi, who hates her life and wants to escape from everything. Her wish comes true and she is magically to the world of Gaea.In the series, an empire called Zaibach was trying to harness the power of Atlantis so everyone's dreams can come true. In the movie, Zaibach is replaced with the Black Dragon clan, and the Black Dragon Clan is trying to destroy the world so everyone's sorrow can be lifted. The Emperor of Zaibach, Dornkirk is absent from the movie, replacing him with Folken who was also in the series. Folken, my favorite character from the series, is turned from a man who believes he is doing the right thing but isn't, into a stereotypical villain who simply wants to destroy the world.Out of nowhere towards the beginning of third act of the movie, suddenly the dragon armor (Guymelefs in the series) Escaflowne has the power to destroy the world. Whether or not it destroys the world, rests in the wish of Hitomi, who is believed to be the legendary Wing Goddess.Everything is solved so quickly by the end. The end fight scene is unexciting and by that time, I just didn't care about the rest of the movie.Its hard to say whats exactly wrong with the movie. I guess its a combination of a weak story, weak characters, poor voice-overs, and bad pacing. The animation is cool in some of the fight scenes. Note I said "some" of the fight scenes.Watch the series, though it has its problems, its far better than this so called "re-telling."

I'm a casual anime fan, someone who doesn't know the intricate plots and history of the genre as much as I supposedly should. I think that's a good thing.So often I watch anime that's been hailed as the best thing since sliced bread, and compared to other more mainstream (read: non-anime) features, IMO it doesn't even come close. I think fans of sub-genres tend to be blind to real critique of their favorite subjects, because they need to justify their excessive interest in it.That being said, you still need to compare like-genre films to one another - at least to some degree, and I think in this case Escaflowne does a great job standing up to its competitors.Someone had previously mentioned that the faces in this feature were rather badly drawn, and I tend to agree - it's odd, because the quality of the rest of the scenes/ scenery, is relatively good. The plot in this film, as in most anime is VERY disconnected, with whole chunks missing at parts. Rewinding certainly helps when watching this. However, as with most good anime, even if there is some plot missing, the end message is fairly clear. The score is amazing. It's rare you hear this kind of music in "regular" movies, much less an animated feature.In general, I would recommend watching this on DVD, as you will want to rewind at some points, and try to understand certain elements, and/or watch the fast scenes a few more times.

First of all, I watched this movie once before I even saw any of the series, so I was fairly confused--especially by the amount of characters who appear for a few minutes and then disappear. I knew it was supposed to be a retelling and not a summary of the series, but even on that level, I didn't really "get" Hitomi's reason for caring so much for Van all of a sudden, why that blonde captain (Allen, as I learned later) was even there, or what the hell Dune (or Folken, take your pick) was all about. The confrontation with Dune was so incredibly anti-climactic that I almost hoped for that old horror cliche of the villain coming back to life a few times to up his kill stats. No such luck, though.Having just gone through a marathon session with the series (all twenty-six episodes in two days), I decided to watch the movie again this morning. Well, I had fun identifying all the characters from the series, who were all--down to the cat girls--developed into realistic characters throughout the television series, and it was kind of interesting to compare Hitomi's character (in the movie, she's totally depressed but realized the pain she was causing others; in the series, she was lively, but in being so, she missed the signs that she was hurting people). However, the story (which recasts Hitomi as a "Winged Goddess" figure instead of a girl with skills at fortune telling, and Van into an uncontrollably violent person, but sweet and gentle when he's not killing people) isn't all that interesting (and seems to have been more influenced by the Evangelion series and movies than by Escaflowne), and 96 minutes is far too short a time to tell what should have been a sweeping epic. Instead, despite the claims that it is a retelling, it ends up feeling even more like a truncation of the series.That said, I thought the animation was good (in an anime genre sort of way--I wouldn't expect a lot of other people to care too much for it, the way that even anime haters tend to like Studio Ghibli films), and the design for Hitomi, though not as kawaii as the series, really did fit with the darker tone of the movie.6/10