ShangLuda
Admirable film.
Sameer Callahan
It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.
Kirandeep Yoder
The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.
bongo fury
This film embodies everything wrong with anime. Everything in the film has been copied from somewhere else, but has lost its context in the process, leaving a soulless, formulaic film. Having been adapted from a TV series, the story makes very little sense and is filled with superfluous characters. This isn't that big a problem, as you will have probably heard the plot a million times before, and every character fits into a tired anime stereotype. There's the angsty schoolgirl (who for some reason wears her uniform for the entirety of her stay in fantasyland), Mr. Long Hair Big Eyes Big Sword, Cat-Girl, etcetera. The dialogue is equally clichéd, as you would expect from such cookie cutter characters. More than that, the clichés are very poorly done, and make little sense. For example, the Hotheaded Hero is about to kill the Schoolgirl heroine (well he is waving his sword around and saying he will) when his boss orders him not to. Of course, being hot-headed he then attacks his boss and they proceed to fight. The worst thing about this film, however, is the voice acting. I realise that the kind of people who would like Escaflowne would be listening to the original Japanese anyway, but the dub was particularly bad. The animation and artistic direction, while technically proficient, is also riddled with lazy unoriginality. When some of the characters sprout angel wings, as they tend to do occasionally, the air is immediately filled with hundreds of feathers, perhaps symbolising something but more likely hollow eye candy. The wings must be moulting at an alarming rate. Anyway, if you have read this far you will have got the message; Escaflowne is an exercise in formulaic shallowness.
stitchman001
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.
Jeremy Bristol
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
rocket26
The show of Escaflowne, the Anime show with 26 episodes, has changed my life in more than one way. For one it changed my opinion on anime, but also introduced me to a message board, where I met an incredible person.However, my comments are about the movie, and not the show, and about the show itself, and not about the good things that happened to me after watching it.The show run was amazing, and the final DVD had a Trailer of the movie. I was amazed by it, however, I was warned it would not be like the series. That didnt matter to me, and I went to see it.The movie was confusing, they did not explain WHY the characters were able to use this power, and even though the graphics were stunning, it was not enough to save this movie from a terrible, unexplained plot.
