… was awful.
In a nutshell, mystical world existing in parallel to our own, schoolgirl recruited from ordinary life in which she doesn’t fit in, to play a role in prophecy therein. Schoolgirl learns something about herself and changes her attitude. World is saved by love.
Oh and let’s also mention that arrival into new world occurs via immersion in mystical water and then breaking out of a giant cocoon. And girl gets wings.
There is the super badass armor that drinks blood, the ultimate fighter badass who is really a dethroned king, and the bad guy who seeks total annihilation for no good reason.
Throw in some utterly pointless magical ability and some big flying dirgible warships, and a catgirl.
A waste of time all around. Thanks, Netflix Recommendation Engine!
You would be talking about the movie? The series is a completely different animal, quality-wise (IMO, of course). The movie is rather pointless: it doesn’t make much sense without the series, but it doesn’t add anything (well, beneficial)) to the series storyline. It seems like they basically take the series’s base ideas, emo them all up, add much more blood, and squeeze it into 90 minutes.
I guess there was a few silver lining; they did remake the villian, “Folken”, into a look-a-like of David Bowie in “Labyrinth”… That was good for a laugh.
yeah, it was the movie. I couldn’t help but compare it to Twelve Kingdoms in my mind. I guess I shouldnt write off the series, but whats the likelihood it was as good as 12K?
I totally thought the same thing about Bowie and Labyrinth!
The movie and the series are completely different. The movie follows a long tradition of “look at all the pretty pictures” and “plot? What plot?” movie adaptations.
That said, no, the series isn’t as good as 12k.
I agree that the Escaflowne series is not in the same league as Twelve Kingdoms. However the movie sounds much, much worse than either.
The movie was terrible, but *please* don’t judge the series by it.
Otto, I am holding judgement on the series. But frankly neither am I motivated to give it a shot anytime soon. I will probaly watch it eventually.
Why bother with it when there are so many other things out there that you’re more likely to like?
agreed, but I have two queus – the most-watch and the “what the heck”. They get processed in parallel. Ranma actually moved from one to the other.
I’ve never seen the movie, although word is it sucks. The TV series is pretty good until they rushed through an ending to fit the 26-episode format. But it’s definitely not Steve’s sort of thing, and I wouldn’t have expected it to be your type of thing, either.
It’s your typical wish-fulfillment schoolgirl-goes-to-Oz fantasy, with a schizo-tech setting – giant robots in dragonland. There’s a somewhat confusing plot organized around mechanized fate – the *actual* villain is Isaac Newton (seriously, no kidding), who has been building an empire in fantasyland to support his research into constructing a vast fate-manipulation device.
It was grand eye-candy for its day – mid-late Nineties, and it was the last really good show Shoji Kawamori produced before that cult ate his mind & doomed us all to endless pointless variations on eco-mysticism and random rubbish like Aquarion.
Think of Escaflowne as a more shoujoish variant on mid-Nineties post-Evangelion mecha-angst.
Good music, though.
Series had a great soundtrack.
How the heck were you supposed to figure out that the villain was Newton? I never picked up on that until I read Wikipedia…
Overall, I thought it was a waste of four Netflix slots, but at least it was better than Record of Lodoss War…