Review of Escaflowne: The Movie (2000) by U E — 22 Aug 2007

Don't watch more than the first beautiful 15 minutes of this film. After the title sequence the movie utterly humiliates one of the best anime series ever. The artwork is the only redeeming quality of this film, most everything else is par, but what kills the film is the lousy plotting and pacing. The story is a mishmash of condensing some 8 hours of series into 90 minutes.

The pacing and character development that made the series almost perfect is utterly dismantled to attempting to convince the audience that violent and suicidal people can take a complete turn of heart by the end without providing any reason whatsoever for that change?which it fails at. Allen is reduced to a periphery character, heck, the moleman and Millerna get more sceentime, and thus the love triangles are absent as is the wonderful subplot behind Dilando. Do yourself a favor and skip this flick and watch the series.