released 01 oct 08 / last mod 01 oct 08 / greg goebel / public domain
* At the beginning of ESCAFLOWNE, an anime video series in 26 episodes on 8 DVDs, we meet Hitomi, a Japanese high-schooler who likes to tell fortunes on tarot cards. She's on the high-school track team and infatuated with the team captain, Amano. One evening she's performing trials under his direction and a streak of light comes out of the sky, depositing a young swordsman and a dragon. Hitomi becomes entangled in the battle between the two and ends up being transported back to the magical world of Gaea.
The swordsman turns out to be Van, young king of the land of Fanelia. All there want to be helpful and send Hitomi back to the "Mystic Moon" -- what they call Earth, it can be seen by some magic process in the skies of Gaea. However, war intervenes and Hitomi becomes caught up in the conflict -- in fact, the fight becomes increasingly centered around her and her relationship with Lord Van's giant suit of armor (sort of a "mystical mecha") named Escaflowne. In the course of events Hitomi meets many strange beings and has many adventures.
* I got curious about ESCAFLOWNE because I had seen the stand-alone follow-up to the series, ESCAFLOWNE THE MOVIE, finding it pretty, with a very nice soundtrack, but with a fairly thin plot. I figured the full series would probably flesh it out a bit.
Actually, it doesn't, at least not in a useful way. ESCAFLOWNE is a fairly typical anime series, illustrating the strengths and weaknesses of such things: it's colorful, action-oriented, and has interesting characters, but the need to string the story along from half-hour episode to half-hour episodes means that the scriptwriters are forced to keep coming up with new contrivances to keep things in motion. What ends up happening is that the story weaves back and forth across the road, moving at times very rapidly but only in circles.
ESCAFLOWNE is also a fairly old piece of anime, dated 1996, and it shows, the artwork and character design being mediocre -- not outright bad, but unimpressive. It does have a fairly good soundtrack, apparently being one of the early works of Yoko Kanno, but in the end the movie follow-on, even given its thin plot, is far more interesting. The ESCAFLOWNE series might have been watchable had it been trimmed down to eight episodes or so, but no more than watchable; the episodic meanderings of the full series end up being merely tedious, drifting back and forth and going nowhere, and in the end leaving little but a sense of unsatisfying muddle. The pity of it is that ESCAFLOWNE is often regarded as a "classic" -- which suggests the quality standards of anime in general.
