“Escaflowne: A Girl in Gaea” was one of the last epic anime films with the privilege of being done in cellular animation: and its quality shows. This ish’ is jaw dropping! Person designer Nobuteru Yūki’s drool-inducing creations are palpably elegant and have textural weight, a rarity in the medium. The central cast in particular will remind you of the moment you fell in love with anime’s strange hyper-reality. Visual moneyshots abound: beautiful clothing flowing in the wind, sunsets reflecting off of armor, and villains brooding in the dark. On that measure the movie is essential to animation enthusiasts of any stripe. Also of note are the action scenes, which are gorgeously done and whose fluidity and detail astound. The cinematography is often excellent as well, utilizing moments of like a landscape’s pensive stillness to punctuate and frame scenes. Some of the locations and background characters are a bit rote, but they still manage to be lovingly detailed and realized. Of course, musical couple Yoko Kanno and Hajime Mizugitchi’s score is charismatic and memorable. I especially like the vocal and choral pieces and the lower key string ques are also intriguing. When the film gets its audio/visual narrative mixture right, the effect is almost mystical and extremely captivating!
Yet these virtues are blunted, because this is quite a flawed picture…ending a half hour premature for a normal movie epic, and being half hour too long for what the film actually provides in narrative. When I popped the movie in for the first time, I was dismayed to read its runtime on the keepcase because I knew it wasn’t long enough. In a typical television to big-screen fashion, there are way too many characters, and said characters motivations are vague and change when the story needs them to. We get treated to lots of cameos that distract from fleshing out the main trio of characters (Hitomi, Vaan and Folken) i.e. where the major drama waited to be cooked up. Boiling down about ten hours of television into ninety minutes is a difficult and admirable task, but one can’t help but wish that the product turned out differently. As said before, when this work gets it together, it WORKS. My favorite scene in the entire film occurs at Dryden’s Inn. Naria and Eyira, the cat sisters who served Folken in the anime, are adapted into two dancing girls. They sing an absolutely enchanting version of the film’s central song motif (“Song of the Dragon Clan” whose original version is a bit wonky to be honest) in what results as an actualization of just about everything I love in fantasy. The scene is draped in a bluish haze, parallel to the bluish notes of the new-age synthline that carrys the song, which is then held aloft by a slow electro pulse. The dancers are beautifully dressed in cultural costume and submerged in this interior scene where patrons converse and listen in a lifelike manner. The scene itself does not further the action directly, but instead shows us how elemental and important the legend of the Dragon Clan is to the general population of Gaia. It feels natural and inspired, and it naturally brings on chills. I love the short scene so much that I can’t help but lament about the rest of the film.
I must echo the usual complaints that we’ve heard over the years in that Hitomi is a shadow of her irresistible television personage due to how little time we get to understand why she feels so terrible. How did such a state attract the attention of Folken, who likely had access to countless other depressed teenagers? Why is she a chosen one? To be fair, when I watched this movie for the day of its DVD release in summer 2002, my passage through puberty was giving me the first tastes of chronic depression, a sign of what the rest of my life was to be like (my reasons for being depressed were certainly not very dramatic at all at that time). And of course such states mostly go unnoticed by passerby’s in reality, but we get all of a few lines of dialogue and scenes to impart her despondency. She cannot coalesce into a complicated and emotional teenager, instead wilting into someone mean spirited who lashes out at her friend for the heck of it. Spending more time on Earth with her and establishing her as the case as a link between worlds would have undoubtedly made her a much more appealing heroine and given the film the true center it needed. Someone derivative of Nausicaä or Nadia would have even worked much better. It is wise to show that Hitomi feels guilt over her previous behavior in one scene, but it isn’t enough. The obligatory “metaphysical” montage that we get at the end of film also gives us a few vague images and lines about loneliness that cannot stand up to the grandiosity surrounding it. The emotions and motivations of the characters should endeavor to be as baroque as their surroundings.
In a similar way, Folken’s ambiguous turncoat from the series is reduced to a rote nihilistic overlord out of a 90’s JRPG. His motivation to “end everything” is fueled merely because he was passed up in line for the throne, and that is it. It is unclear as to why he chooses to destroy his homeland instead of merely seizing it, and his world ending ambitions are just as uncertain. It is possible that the film hinted at this reason with his relationship to dark technologies and sorcery later on, and if he were subject to some mind-warping revelations then at least we would have that. But otherwise he is a significant weakness in the story. A shame. Van is the only character that gets somewhat close to being what he needs to be: a (secretly) compassionate warrior who nevertheless will stop at nothing to destroy the wicked, even if it means his own demise. It is hard not to be interested in someone like that! As a more aggressive and vengeful rendition of his TV character, we are treated to some very cool battle scenes and moments of quiet that show us his softer side that had been pushed underneath his surface. But again, there isn’t enough time to define him as more than just that.
The film really wants to be “Akira” or “Evangelion” in its more violent and destructive scenes, but merely shadows those milestones without taking faith in its own fantasy world. Escaflowne itself bleeds and contorts like the Eva units, while the telekinetic battles between Dragon Clan members are pure Tetsuo vs. Possessed Kei and tacked on for a big screen wallop. While they are admittedly cool and flawlessly done, they distract from the numerous phenomena that the TV series already had. The original was conceived as “Macross” mixed with “Dunbine” on paper but it resulted in “Escaflowne.” Here we get something like “Escaevakira.” I also suppose part of what makes me like the film is the fact that it is even connected to such a lovely and fun show. It is familiar, and gives us a chance to reenter the world of Gaea. And reality surely encourages repeat escapes to fantasy.
Despite all this dissing, I really like this movie, because there is the feeling that I have about it being “right” in what it is: a stately adventure through a different yet similar place that is filled with numerous familiar beings and locales. It is rather bare, lacks a real central focus and does not live up to its huge promise, but it somehow ends up being rather rich, riffs on some really cool motifs and at times conjures up real wonder and awe. But therein lies one of the film’s intrigues, a viewer knows that there is something very, very right going on despite all the elements that are very, very wrong. Personally, I am quite forgiving of ‘visual-feast’ type films because they serve a really important role in reminding audiences that not everything needs to be a tightly plotted potboiler. We as escapists need a chance to feel things beyond the immediately visceral. Images and music on their own have value, because they can say things in languages beyond what the tongue can conjure, and should not be neglected in the face of stone-faced rigidity and literalism. Animation has considerable powers to make us 3D beings feel 4D things through the illusion of motion and depth on a 2D surface. I only wished this formula worked in "Escaflowne: A Girl in Gaea."
