The TV series gave us a cheerful girl with fortune-telling cards and a slow-burn romance on a world of flying castles. The movie opens with Van covered in blood and Hitomi writing a suicide note.
This week on Toonami Absolution, Alyx, Jon, and Sam cover Escaflowne: The Movie (2000), the theatrical reimagining of The Vision of Escaflowne, which takes the same characters, setting, and mecha and tells an almost entirely different story about them.
Hitomi Kanzaki begins the film in a state of profound depression, estranged from her only friend and holding an unsent farewell letter. She is pulled to Gaea not by a glowing boy on a track field but by a call from the world itself. Apparently, she is the deity figure the world's people have been waiting for, a Winged Goddess prophesied to revive the mech Escaflowne. Van here is no eager young king but a blood-soaked loner with a death wish and no kingdom left to fight for.
Allen is recast as a rebel leader rather than a knight-errant. Folken, stripped of his TV series' more nuanced arc, becomes a nihilist who wants to destroy Gaea and himself along with it, a villain whose motivation is, essentially, that he has decided the world does not deserve to exist, which puts him in an interesting conversation with Hitomi's opening scene. The film threads together depression, the desire for annihilation, and the idea that being called from your world into another might be the universe responding to a wish you didn't know you were making. The animation is exceptional throughout. The Yoko Kanno score is one of her finest. The compressed 96-minute runtime leaves almost no room to breathe, and several characters who matter in the series exist here only as faces in a crowd.
We discuss how the film functions as a standalone work versus how it functions as an adaptation, what its darker tonal register accomplishes and where it falls short, and whether the \"suicidal protagonist summoned to a world that needed her\" premise is a compelling reframe or a step too far from what made the TV series work.
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