The Vision of Escaflowne

As mentioned in the Twelve Kingdoms review, my quest to watch the most popular fantasy/isekai from 20-ish years ago continues, and the next one on my list was Escaflowne. Now, I've heard about this anime time and time again and I mostly heard words of praise. It was compared to Evangelion before Evangelion, best fantasy anime ever made, best isekai etc. etc. After watching it however... I can definitely say I liked Twelve Kingdoms a lot more.

On the first glance, both of these shows share the same flaws. Both had their funding cut short, although while Twelve Kingdoms was more interrupted and didn't finish, Escaflowne was condensed but finished. Both seemed to have a lot of unfinished plot threads. Another flaw they share is an annoying main character, but Twelve Kingdoms fixes that around episode 12 (out of 45, so pretty early on all in all!) while... Escaflowne never fixed it. In fact, all of Escaflownes characters are so bizarre to me that I can't wrap my head around them. This show had the most ridiculous and forced (quite literally, plot forced!) love triangle I've ever seen. Love triangles and love misunderstandings are a big reason why I tend to skip over romance shows and shojo anime, despite me preferring female protagonists. Anyway, let me start hating the characters. First we have Hitomi, the main character. She falls in love with like 4 different dudes throughout the show and despite having a future telling ability, or more like a faith altering ability, she's never able to utilise it properly once throughout the show (on a second thought I actually find this sort of cool because she's not in the show to fight or to be an amazing protagonist, but it's still a bit frustrating). Despite being told how to do it somewhere around the middle of it. She keeps changing her mind regarding her love interest, and one of her love interests is Allan that's around 30?? years old. Allan is probably my most hated character. He's a full blown misogynist, constantly belittling Hitomi and saying how he literally wants to keep her in a cage. The dude knocked up a queen (that had a husband) and never took part in raising the child or taking responsibility, even after the king died. Then he went on to fall in love with the queen's sister. And then Hitomi. He was full on ready to be with the princess but Hitomi cucked him with her fate altering powers. That's actually the only time she consciously used her powers lol. And the most disgusting part is, he had feelings for Hitomi (even before being forcefully manipulated to kiss her) but at the end of the show he says Hitomi reminds him of his little sister. What the fuck!!! His horrible treatment of women could be explained by the fact that maybe the world he was raised in is also like that but then it makes no sense for Hitomi to accept his weird comments since she comes from the modern day world. Van is a character I actually liked, he's your typical action focused male fantasy protagonist that doesn't have time for romance. Endearing in a way, but his lack of ability to express feelings made the show ending so... limp. Despite their amazing true real love being the thing that saves the whole world, the two of them decide not to stay with each other? Insted Hitomi went back to her world. Left me feeling more on the edge than Twelve Kingdom's ending even though that show literally never had a real ending to it.

The way both shows deal with having female heroines are vastly different. However, a part of that is because of the worlds the main characters found themselves in, they're vastly different too. But I still think it's worth a mention. In Escaflowne, Hitomi is constantly baragged with "you're a woman you should stay away" comments but there's never any rebutals to them. She does stay away. She never proves anyone wrong. Yoko in Twelve Kingdoms is pretty amazing though, as she goes from this timid, boring perfect girl to an actual Queen that needs to fight her way to the top. Just the way in which her development happened was so well done, I rarely see it being done in anime with female characters. The way Hitomi and other characters have this ability to constantly fall in and out of love is impressive. It just makes for such lukewarm romance that I wasn't rooting for anyone at all, I just got super pissed.

One thing I can say I liked about Escaflowne was the music and the animation. The soundtrack was scored by none other than Yoko Kanno so of course it's going to be great, and the animation was impressive for an episodic tv anime at the time. I'm not really going to complain much about the never resolved plot points because it's whatever to me. I might watch the movie somewhere down the line because I heard it had a darker tone that the show. A lot of people seemed to complain about the art style and the noses but I really had no problems with it.

Despite me shitting on this anime so much, I had fun watching it because it was pretty nonsensical. If someone watched this anime as a kid or a teen I can totally see why they'd like it and have fond memories of it. In that sense, it's not that bad and the problems it suffers from can be seen in a lot of anime with similar themes, so it's not really outstandingly horrible. I guess I just had my standards set high by an anime seemingly more obscure from this one that follows the same premise, hence my disillusionment.