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.
Review of Escaflowne: The Movie
