The Vision of Escaflowne

1996. TV series. (26 X 30 min.) Mecha/fantasy. dir Kazuki Akane. scr Shoji Kawamori, Ryota Yamaguchi, others. mus Yoko Kanno. des Nobuteru Yuuki, Junya Ishigaki, Kimitoshi Yamane, Mahiro Maeda, others. -jd

An Earth girl is transported to a medieval world where nations fight their wars with armies of robots that resemble giant knights in armor, in an imaginative fusion of fantasy adventure, mecha action, and tragic romance.

Teenager Hitomi Kanzaki is a sprinter on her high school track team. Hitomi is also an amateur fortune-teller who reads Tarot cards and uses her jeweled pendant, a family heirloom, for dowsing and divination. One night while running a practice race to impress a handsome upperclassman, Hitomi is surprised by a beam of light from the heavens that produces a strangely costumed warrior and a monstrous, fire-breathing dragon. The warrior slays the dragon, and then the beam of light reappears and carries the warrior—and Hitomi—back to the warrior’s homeworld, the mysterious planet of Gaea. The Earth, which Gaea’s inhabitants call the “mystic moon,” is visible in Gaea’s sky, although Gaea itself cannot be seen from Earth.

The warrior, Van Fanel, is the young ruler of a tiny kingdom called Fanelia and is heir to its secret weapon, a huge mechanical suit of armor called the Escaflowne. When Van’s kingdom is attacked and burned to the ground by the war machines of the Zaibach Empire, Van barely manages to escape in the Escaflowne, again taking Hitomi along for the ride. Seeking refuge in the peaceful neighboring kingdom of Asturia, the pair is joined by the charismatic Allen Schezar, one of Asturia’s most celebrated knights (and also a look-alike for the handsome upperclassman that Hitomi likes back on Earth). Hitomi’s fortune-telling proves to be an invaluable asset during Zaibach’s attacks. In fact, her powers of clairvoyance are stronger on Gaea; her dowsing pendant can detect Zaibach war machines despite their cloaks of invisibility, and her Tarot card readings seem to determine the future rather than merely predicting it.

Controlling the future happens to be the goal of Zaibach’s enigmatic Emperor Dornkirk as well. With materials gathered through his war effort, Dornkirk is building a machine, a “fate alteration engine,” that will seize control of destiny itself. Based on Atlantean technology, the machine will enable Dornkirk to rewrite fortunes, granting the wishes of every being on Gaea. It’s up to Van, Allen, Hitomi, and their allies to stop him before Gaea suffers the same fate as Atlantis, whose inhabitants’ own powers to grant wishes destroyed that kingdom long ago. Additionally, Hitomi will have to sort out her own heart’s conflicting wishes about Allen and Van.

Escaflowne is a fantastically beautiful series, with striking production design. Each kingdom of Gaea has its own distinctive style of architecture, clothing, and decoration. Van’s homeland of Fanelia has a Japanese aesthetic, with a touch of medieval Europe in its knights’ heavy armor. Allen’s home kingdom of Asturia resembles the Italian city of Venice right down to the canals, and features a replica of the Bridge of Sighs. The kingdom of Freyd, another stop on Van and Hitomi’s tour across Gaea while fleeing from Zaibach, seems to be a fusion of Thailand, Tibet, and Arabia, with bald, orange-robed priests and turbaned warriors wielding scimitars. Zaibach is a dark industrial necropolis, like the high-tech Los Angeles of Blade Runner. A wide variety of human races populate Gaea’s kingdoms, but there are also beast people: cat-girls, gekko-people, mermaids, and men who look like rats, moles, or dogs. Descendants of Atlantis have wings like angels. Human characters have swooping scoop noses, sharp jawlines, and large, liquid eyes. Glossy highlights on hair are drawn as halo-like circles around the whole top of the head.

The mecha that Gaea’s kingdoms use in battle are essentially giant exoskeletons worn like suits of armor, decked out with ornate crests and flowing cloaks. Some of these capes also double as invisibility cloaks. The operator’s movements control the motion of the machine, and the animation often gives us glimpses of gears grinding as the warriors struggle to control them. The Escaflowne can transform into a flight mode that resembles a dragon, and Van controls it by standing on its back and pulling on two guidelines, steering it like a glider. These wondrous machines are supported by an entire system of fantasy technology in which dragon’s hearts serve as energy sources, and levitation rocks are used to build airships that look like small floating islands. Limited use of computer graphics adds texture to dragon skins, and otherworldly, nightmarish effects to Hitomi’s visions.

Composer Yoko Kanno produced a wonderful musical soundtrack for Escaflowne, with Middle Eastern-sounding pieces evoking 1001 Arabian Nights, some tracks with a more medieval flavor, and ominous battle music with choruses of chanting male vocalists. It’s easily one of the best anime soundtracks of the past decade, really only challenged by Kanno’s other scores for Cowboy Bebop and Macross Plus.

A movie version, The Vision of Escaflowne: A Girl in Gaea, an alternate retelling of the story, was produced in 2000.

Escaflowne is an incredibly well executed fusion of familiar anime genres and devices. There is a love triangle, rather like Macross, as Hitomi becomes the object of affection for two handsome men. Hitomi’s pendant, which connects her to the lost super-civilization of Atlantis, is a plot device reminiscent of both Castle in the Sky and Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water. Hitomi is yanked away to Gaea via a beam of light from the heavens, almost exactly like Show Zama in Aura Battler Dunbine, and similarly becomes an important figure in a medieval world where nations fight wars with giant robots. But Escaflowne is more than the sum of its derivative parts—it’s the ultimate evolution of the unique-to-anime fantasy-mecha genre, which began in the 1980s with shows such as Dunbine and Panzer World Galient. Unlike Lord of the Rings–inspired Western fantasies, Escaflowne is not a quest to defeat ultimate evil, but a story about warring kingdoms and the reasons why such conflicts evolve. The visual spectacle of huge knights in armor clashing swords on the battlefield—and it is a spectacular, exciting image—is just icing on the cake.

Dornkirk, the mad scientist who controls the Zaibach Empire, believes that human beings inhabit a mechanistic universe in which their actions are controlled by an unalterable destiny. He develops a variety of techno-magical means to control and manipulate fate, from doping his minions with a special serum to enhance their luck, to building a giant destiny engine that will turn his every wish into reality. Hitomi’s relationship with fate is more passive. She uses her Tarot cards and divining pendant to make predictions, but gradually comes to realize that she has the power to determine fortunes as well as read them. Ultimately, the series calls Dornkirk’s beliefs into question by demonstrating that everyone has the ability to change their fate through the power of their will and the strength of their wishes. Additional props such as Hitomi’s cards or Dornkirk’s machine serve only to magnify a power that already exists.

Hitomi is one of the series’ great strengths, a refreshingly strong-willed and practical heroine not given to whining or babyish behavior. Athletic and long-limbed, with a tomboyish haircut and running shoes, Hitomi has realistic reactions to the situations in which she finds herself, from fear and anger to bravery and swooning teenage love. Both of Hitomi’s love interests have their strengths and flaws (and their own suitors, aside from Hitomi), and her lingering indecision between rough, passionate Van and the elegant Allen ends up being crucially important to the conclusion of the series, although the rather abrupt and ambiguous ending to the romantic plot may leave viewers somewhat disappointed.

A movie version of the story, Escaflowne: A Girl in Gaea, opted for an entirely different approach from the TV series. Its story revolves around a desperately depressed Hitomi being drawn into Gaea to activate the “god” Escaflowne, which will then be used to destroy the world. Although most of the TV characters reappear in the movie, their roles are very different; Van, for example, is changed from a brash young knight to a violent berserker. Despite a high budget and gorgeous animation, A Girl in Gaea disappointed many fans of the series by significantly changing the entire tone of the story, as well as the look of Gaea itself.

Hitomi’s premonitions foil an assassination attempt in “City of Intrigue.” An enemy targets Van Fanel from a distance, and Hitomi runs up to shove him aside before a metal rod can skewer him. The animation makes the most of the onrushing menace with extreme perspective, and Hitomi races to reach Van like a sprinter in a track meet, tearing off the skirt of the beautiful dress she’d just been given as she runs.

In “Dangerous Wounds,” the Escaflowne is badly damaged in battle, and Van along with it, thanks to a sort of mystical fusion with the armor. The only way to repair the ancient machine is to summon its builders, the Ispano Clan, who descend from a portal that suddenly opens in the sky in an enormous contraption that that looks like a mechanical arm reaching down from heaven. Once the Escaflowne is repaired, Van returns to battle only to descend into a howling berserker fury that is a chilling tour de force of brutal action, backed by Yoko Kanno’s pulse-pounding music.

“Operation Golden Rule of Love” shows destiny alteration in action: using Dornkirk’s machine, Hitomi and Allen’s fates are manipulated through proxies in Zaibach. As their counterparts in the destiny alteration machine embrace, Hitomi and Allen mirror their motions, and share a passionate kiss as a shocked Van looks on.

Shoji Kawamori is credited as cocreator of Escaflowne along with Hajime Yadate (a Sunrise studio pseudonym for diverse creative hands), and also served as story editor and drew storyboards for the series. Kawamori created Macross Plus, directed Spring and Chaos and Earth Girl Arjuna, and designed mecha for the entire Macross franchise.

Composer Yoko Kanno also scored Macross Plus, Cowboy Bebop, Brain Powered, Turn A Gundam, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and Wolf’s Rain. Her husband, co-composer Hajime Mizoguchi, also created the score for Jin-Roh and Please Save My Earth, and played cello on the Escaflowne soundtrack.

Dubbed into English by the Ocean Group, a Canadian ADR studio that also handled the English adaptations of popular anime such as Ranma 1⁄2 and Gundam Wing, and edited for U.S. standards and practices (four episodes were trimmed from the lineup), Escaflowne aired briefly on U.S. television on the Fox Kids network on Saturday morning and Friday afternoon timeslots in 2000, but only aired nine episodes before being pulled from broadcast due to low ratings. In contrast, the full edited series aired on YTV in Canada in 2000, and on Fox Kids UK in the United Kingdom in 2001. Bandai Entertainment’s DVD release presents the uncut Japanese series, in both English and Japanese.

The Tarot cards that accompany each episode title are custom-designed for the series, with suits of Serpents and/or Dragons, Beasts, Birds, and Fishes, instead of the more standard Wands, Pentacles, Swords, and Cups. The card shown gives a clue to the theme of the episode that follows.

Although never stated outright, it’s indicated in the animation that Emperor Dornkirk is actually the famous 17th-century scientist, philosopher, alchemist, and mathematician Isaac Newton, hence Dornkirk’s ruminations on gravity and his belief in a mechanistic, clockwork universe.

The Vision of Escaflowne manga, published in English by Tokyopop, is based on series creator Kawamori’s original concepts but bears little resemblance to the anime itself.

violence There is a great deal of death on the battlefield, all of it portrayed as intentionally brutal and ugly—there is no glamorization of violence to be found here. Characters are impaled and sliced by swords, riddled with arrows, crushed to death. Limbs are torn off. Van suffers grievous, bloody wounds. nudity Glimpses of naked buttocks, both male and female.