The Vision of Escaflowne tries to juggle a lot of different balls, and basically succeeds. Firstly, it's a good old fashioned fantasy adventure serial with goodies and baddies and sword fights and monsters and thrilling escapes and all that exciting stuff. Bound up with that is the fact that it's somewhat of a mecha series, with the magically powered suits naturally allowing major characters to dominate fight scenes. However, it's also a mystical and rather melancholy series about fate and how it can be fixed or changed, punctuated with a fairly large amount of on screen death and injury. Also it's got a rather shoujo-esque romance with a knotty love polygon and some really beautiful looking men. The series was originally intended to be 39 episodes rather than 26 and you can tell - some plot threads sort of just stop, appear late on, and/or get resolved jarringly fast. That said, I'm not necessarily sure that an additional 13 episodes wouldn't have come along with making the pacing a bit sluggish. As is, it seems to fill 26 episodes more or less nicely, even if it has to lurch a few times to get there, especially in the back half, and the ending in particular feels rather rushed.
Hitomi is a likeable heroine, and the script manages to quite effectively let her make choices that drive the plot without having to have her take part in the fighting herself. A careful balance is struck between giving her a believable fear of violence and death with a drive to see them not meted out to her friends. The Escaflowne's pilot Van isn't as deep, remaining driven by the need to avenge his homeland throughout, but still gets to evolve in how he approaches it emotionally. The central two are supported by an ensemble of engaging side players: the swashbuckling Allen, the lovesick princess Millerna, and the petulant but vulnerable catgirl Merle, among others. The truncated length does leave a few of the cast with slightly less to do than was perhaps intended, but the most important ones are correctly kept to the fore.
Escaflowne is almost always a lovely series to look at. It is animated with all the lushness you'd expect of Sunrise at the end of the cel animation era, with beautifully fluid motion on the mechs in particular, and the direction makes great use of it to bring life to some wonderfully artistic shot compositions. Yoko Kanno's score is predictably great, and gives the strange and wonderous elements the accompaniment they deserve.
The bottom line is that Escaflowne is a fantastically well produced series that is let down mostly by the circumstances of its creation, and make it less than it perhaps could have been, but what is there is broadly a well executed marriage of disparate elements.
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