646f9e108c A grim retelling of the television series &quot;The Vision of Escaflowne&quot;. High school student Hitomi Kanzaki, depressed and despondent, wishes to disappear from her world. Her wishes are heard in the alternate world of Gaea where a battle for absolute control is raging! Magically, Hitomi is suddenly transported to this other world and is bestowed with the power to decide its ultimate fate! First, let me state my prejudice: I think the series is the greatest animated series of all time and its universe is one of the great fantasy creations of the twentieth century. What the artists here do with it is spectacular, and one scene in the movie–the resurrection of Escaflowne and the battle of the guymalefs–captures the magic of the series. Otherwise, it is all flash and noise and action. And blood. And loud, not very good music. The story is stiffly told, and is stripped down so far that most of it makes little sense except by reference to the series. The characters are lost, half of them are extraneous, only the maniacal Dilandau comes across–he is done muchin the series–and even here the explanation for him is missing. It looksif the producers were trying to turn this into another _Akira_, but they chose the wrong property. In short: not enough girl, not enough Gaea, not enough. 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&#39;t really &quot;get&quot; Hitomi&#39;s reason for caring so much for Van all of a sudden, why that blonde captain (Allen,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.<br/><br/>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&#39;s character (in the movie, she&#39;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 Hitomia &quot;Winged Goddess&quot; figure instead of a girl with skills at fortune telling, and Van into an uncontrollably violent person, but sweet and gentle when he&#39;s not killing people) isn&#39;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.<br/><br/>That said, I thought the animation was good (in an anime genre sort of way–I wouldn&#39;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 notkawaiithe series, really did fit with the darker tone of the movie.<br/><br/>6/10 Becomes blandly idealistic.
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