Escaflowne is another series that I watched very early in my
anime watching career. At the time I
wasn’t aware of all the stereotypes involved in this series, but even if I had
been I suspect I still would have found it worth watching. I’m going to talk about the series in this
post, NOT the movie, which I did not think was worth watching.
Escaflowne is a fantasy, mecha, magic, winged-people,
dragons, floating rocks, transformers, love story. How’s that for a description? This series follows the exploits a high
school girl who is accidentally dragged into the battles of another world. Kanzaki Hitomi is your relatively normal
average high school girl with a penchant for reading people’s fortunes in the
tarot cards and being right. She’s also
a little psychic in that she has visions and she’s on the school track
team. While running a practice race which
is being timed by a boy on the track team that she has a crush on, she runs
into a dragon-hunting Prince from another world named Van Fanel . . . literally
runs into him. He slays the dragon which
has appeared with him in her world, and Hitomi and Van return to his world, just in
time to see his kingdom destroyed by invaders.
This is the background of the story. Hitomi’s world is a blue marble in the sky of
Van’s world. Van’s world has floating
ships and magic, and Van himself has wings when he needs to. He also is the surviving Prince of his
kingdom and has the power to drive the kingdom’s special mecha,
Escaflowne. Escaflowne also has a dragon
form and can fly in that form. With his
kingdom destroyed Van is a target of several bad guys. He and Hitomi flee and take refuge in a neighboring
kingdom.
The story is a love story that starts out as a love triangle
between Hitomi, Van and Allen Schezar, a gorgeous soldier from the kingdom they
take refuge in. Hitomi, being a high
school girl, doesn’t understand her true feelings for the two men, so the love
story is interwoven throughout the series. The series does a great job of
following the characters as they each wrestle with their own demons and
essentially grow up and/or come to terms with their pasts.
Escaflowne has something for pretty much everyone. It’s an
epic saga about fighting to restore a kingdom’s pride, honor and lands, as well
as a love story. It has
mecha/transformer creations and people with magic abilities and gifts. There are battles between individuals and
between kingdoms. There is trust and
betrayal between brothers, and sacrificing one’s life for others. Looking back at it, it really does include an
incredible amount in one series. It also
has some negative aspects, including the token death of Van’s brother, Folken. I really hate unnecessary, token deaths.
As usual, this synopsis doesn’t begin to cover all the
details of the plot or even a small part of the total cast of characters. It’s simply a bare bones description of the
basic story and main characters. There’s
so much more detail involved, that a single post can’t do it justice.
The series does a good job of tying up the loose ends and
wrapping everything up at the end.
Despite that, I didn’t really appreciate the ending, or rather I would
have ended it quite differently. That
and the token death were my two negatives about this series. Everything else was really well done. The music is wonderful. Yoko Kanno did the music, so of course it could be nothing short of exceptional. The plot is unique
enough and entertaining enough to keep me interested and waiting anxiously for
the next DVD to come out, 
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