Forum - View topicThe Vision of ANNCastaflowne
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relyat08
 Posts: 4125 Location: Northern Virginia |
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It was kind of fun listening to Zac give in to his nostalgia a little bit. I think looking at things critically is fine and for review purposes it is definitely important(and in Zac's case, he clearly is very good at doing so), but for the most part, when someone is just sitting down to watch something for fun, it's okay to turn off the brain, so-to-speak. It was nice to see that Zac, as critical as he tends to be, has shows like that too.
To clarify, I haven't seen Escaflowne yet, as I'm waiting for the pending BD release, so I'm not bashing this show in any way. |
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Fronzel
Posts: 1906 |
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This show needed a cruel editor's knife. You can't recover from losing a third of the running-time by just cramming everything in what you've got left. And it wasn't as if they found out about this when they were half done.
The part where Hitomi is actually controlling events kind of broke it for me because some of the things she had apparently caused she couldn't have possibly imagined. I'm not asking for it to be completely literal or intuitive (it's supposed to be mysterious, after all), but this destiny-changing idea seems to reject any fear or worry which is not a realistic human condition. It seems to less say "focusing on possible disaster will hold you back" and more "never worry about anything ever". The example that I remember is when Dilandu tries to stab Van by surprise from a long distance by pushing his robot's creepy tentacle things to their limit, essentially sniping him. Was the worry that Hitomi had that was supposed to have caused this was just that Van might get killed? That's a completely reasonable fear to have given the circumstances. The movie wasn't good but it did do a few things I rather liked. It did the fantasy-version giant robots better than the TV series, with the robots seemingly like symbiotic monsters or gods or something. The more Renaissance-era style of some of the design (especially the flying ships) was pretty neat. A good scene is early on with Hitomi's suicide note. When her friend discovers it, she mocks Hitomi for how boringly it's written and it's all played for laughs. Then Hitomi says she's not serious and will live out her life normally, and it's then that she sounds terribly sad. The issue with the depressed teenager is not the obvious one, the threat of suicide, but the fact that she doesn't care about being alive; i.e. the depression itself. This was a clever start to a story about depression (rather than an anti-suicide PSA), but it doesn't really carry it through to anywhere interesting, as discussed in the podcast. I do also like the very end where exactly as Hitomi ties up her character arc in a bow (maybe a bit on-the-nose) she slowly fades from Gaia. No big dramatic farewell scene with Van. She stayed exactly as long as she needed. |
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penguintruth
 Posts: 8488 Location: Penguinopolis |
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Oh, I forgot to comment on the English dub.
I thought it was decent. I mean, it's pretty standard Ocean fare, and not anywhere near as good as the Japanese version, but it's not really terrible by any means. Kirby Morrow turns in a decent performance as Van, Paul Dobson is good as Folken, and the guy who plays Dilandau is okay, too. Nobody really shines, but I can't think of anybody that torpedoes their role, either. It's a middle-of-the-road "tolerable" English dub typical of its time and studio. |
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enurtsol
 Posts: 14869 |
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One of those anime that could snag "casual" fans on our univ club showings back in the day. And that OP!
Escaflowne was a big deal to Bandai. Among others, Bandai even flew Hitomi's English VA Kelly Sheridan all the way to Japan for a special event with counterpart seiyuu Maaya Sakamoto. That's how big deal it was. 
animenewsnetwork.com/news/2000-09-24/japanese-advance-premiere-of-escaflowne-the-movie
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Vanadise
 Posts: 518 |
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This was really interesting for me to listen to; I first watched Escaflowne way back in high school when it was first coming out on VHS, and I just re-watched it with my wife, who had never seen it before.
I never knew that it was originally scheduled to be 39 episodes long, but it really shows now that I think about it. Abandoning the pacing of the first half of the show in favor of cramming in as much as possible in every episode definitely hurt the show. I still enjoyed it a lot, but my wife, not having experienced it in her youth as one of her earlier anime series, wasn't nearly so enamoured of it. She didn't dislike it, but wasn't strongly attached to any of the characters and thought the plot got kind of silly and nonsensical as it went along. (Now we're watching through Zakuro, and she's enjoying it a lot more. Man, why doesn't anybody ever talk about Zakuro?) One part of the show, though, that the podcast only briefly touched on and I feel like needs an opposing viewpoint, is Nariya and Eriya. While their character designs are obviously intended to appeal to a certain demographic, they were among both our favorite characters for a couple of reasons. One is their importance to one of the show's more subtle themes: racism. It really beats you over the head with its main themes (fate fate fate, love love love), so nobody pays much attention to it -- but notice how even in the podcast, nobody talks about the beastmen much. In the show, every character in any kind of position of leadership, rulership, or wealth is human. The vast majority of beastmen we see are servants, peasants, or slaves, and nobody bats at eye at it. Van is nice to Merle, and so is Hitomi despite Merle antagonizing her, but, with a few occasional exceptions, the rest of the cast just ignores her. It's obvious that there's systemic racism against beastmen in Gaea, and Eriya and Nariya put a capstone on that; spoiler[their mother is killed by villagers who try to capture and sell them into slavery, and this is treated like it's perfectly normal. The only person who's ever nice to them is Folken, who takes them in, gives them new names, and protects them]. If it wasn't for their arc, you could write off the treatment of beastmen as laziness on the part of the writers who wanted all of the important characters to be human, but instead it's obvious that their treatment is an intentional part of the world. In that light, I think their infatuation with Folken is understandable, which leads to another reason why I like them; they get more character development than most of the secondary characters. The sisters are pretty interchangeable until the episode when spoiler[one of them is used in Dornkirk's plan to separate Hitomi and Van. After Folken kisses Eriya, that changes their relationship. It does lead to the scene that makes everybody uncomfortable when Nariya tries to kiss Eriya, but the jealousy between them also makes them realize that Folken isn't actually romantically interested in either of them. That puts a crack in their unwavering devotion to him. When Nariya later kidnaps Hitomi (in the middle of suffering through their slow, agonizing deaths), Hitomi gives her a "you seem like nice people, why don't you stop being bad guys?" speech, and it actually works, unlike with every other villain ever. She lets Hitomi go and goes back to Folken, where she and Eriya both die and make me sad because they probably would've gotten a lot more development if the series had run another 13 episodes.] Anyway, I think a lot of people unfairly write them off and ignore their importance to the show because of that one scene that makes everybody particularly uncomfortable... and I don't think even that is necessarily a bad scene, because I can appreciate a good scene that makes me squirm a bit and think about why it had that effect and what its purpose was. |
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MaxSterling
 Posts: 35 |
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I remember getting these tapes directly from Bandai Anime Village as they were released. Great beauty in this show and the VHS had great covers. I also saw Fox's broadcast but only saw 2 eps. The Spanish-Latino version was compelling and my preferred version after the Japanese. The music was excellent and to this day I still listen to the soundtracks. The critique isn't without merit, I just don't hear much of the love for the show. I personally love the characters, music, mecha design, and story.
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Galap
Moderator
 Posts: 2354 |
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About the fate engine and what the show was saying about it with the fact that when it wound itself up, the generals became power hungry and wanted to go to war:
I don't think that the show was saying that the natural state of people is to want power, nor is it saying that the machine is bad. I think the main message is that people end up setting up events so that they find themselves in the situations where they have the opportunities they want. Those people were not a normal and random subset of humanity: rather they were army generals, people who self selected to fight to increase the advantage and standing of their own poulations, potentially even at the expense of others. So naturally they would want power, and would be the kind of people to start such wars if their passions were to be amplified and let to run wild. And the circumstances were such that those kind of people were the ones who were there. I think the point is that people, like Dornkirk/spoiler[Newton] often times people create inventions and have ideas, essentially creating value and power in the world, but those in power who serve to use and serve to benefit from them see things in a fundamentally different way, from a less global and long term perspective, and more from a perspective of short term and personal gain. |
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CandisWhite
Posts: 282 |
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The series did run its course on tv. Up here in Canada, YTV aired the whole thing, edited but at least in the proper order, after Fox pulled the plug.
FireChick, I'd be interested to know which dub you watched, or thought that you watched. There were 2 distinct English dubs done: The broadcast dub featured edited violence, scaled back language, and episodes chopped up and animated over; The home release was utterly uncut visually, and had the language scaled up again to its PG-13 level. I love this anime. I came to it through the edited Fox version, and was entranced by it. When I found out that there was an uncut version, through a drama club acquaintance, and then saw said version for sale at a local store, I was on Cloud 9. I bought each volume and watched them inside out. This is one of the earliest anime that I purchased, as I was in high school at the time, though not one of the earliest anime that I watched: It holds a special place in my heart both for its in world and real world existences. |
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Charred Knight
 Posts: 3085 |
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Excellent podcast, in particular I have never seen Zac talk about an anime before like this. Its was incredible to hear Zac grapple with Nostalgia and made me question how I viewed anime from the early 2000s. In terms of talking about AnnCast dedicated to one show, this is easily the best one. Really cant say much about Escaflowne itself because I have only seen like 6 episodes. Just really wanted to mention my appreciation for all of those involved.
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enurtsol
Posts: 14869 |
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The worker, non-anime guy who was literally working on the edits for Fox Kids, actually went to the rec.arts.anime.misc newsgroups to ask for suggestions on how/what can be edited and satisfy the boss Fox's wishes yet still keeping the essence of the story and not nerfing it for the later episodes. T'was an enlightening peek into what goes on behind the scenes on the bosses minds, what can and what cannot be accomplished, plus providing us a heads-up on what to expect to happen in the upcoming eps. But alas, it didn't last too long. |
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Galap
Moderator
Posts: 2354 |
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^ Does that text still exist? I'd very much like to read it if it does.
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enurtsol
Posts: 14869 |
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Seems some newsgroup posts have become missing (either weren't archived or were deleted), but look for posts by tvguy6885 @ my-deja.com like this one:
Or another one:
And this one:
This:
Others:
That:
More:
Or reports like this one:
And of course:
Heheh, Slayers is for another day. |
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FireChick
 Subscriber Posts: 2460 Location: United States |
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The second one. But the "deleted scenes" I'm referring to are scenes that were cut out from the original Japanese broadcast, but are on the recently released Japanese blu-rays. In fact, the recent fansubbings contain those scenes. There's a website detailing them, but it has since gone dead. But there is an old ANN topic about them here: animenewsnetwork.com/bbs/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=126503 |
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vanfanel
 Posts: 1254 |
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Thanks for the trip down memory lane! I'd forgotten all about that guy's updates. I'm wavering on whether to listen to this podcast or not. Escaflowne was one of the first anime I watched raw (just a few eps of it), and I absolutely fell in love with its characters, story, world, and music -- I even love the character designs. I still remember what a thrill it was when Bandai started their Anime Village website and released it on VHS -- I was able to get the whole thing at once, when before I'd been unsure if I'd ever get to see the rest of it at all (bootlegs were a no-no for me). I loved the show, and even though I too always felt the ending was rushed, I'm not keen on listening to harsh criticism of it. Escaflowne's kind of like an ex-girlfriend: I can criticize all I want, but if anyone else starts doing it, I turn protective 
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Vanadise
Posts: 518 |
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For what it's worth, the podcast's treatment of the show was really pretty nice. Unlike some of their podcasts on specific shows, all of the speakers for this one really enjoyed Escaflowne. There's a fair amount of criticism about how rushed the second half of the show was, with a couple of lines about how none of them liked Nariya and Eriya, and of course the movie was terrible and nobody liked it... but I don't remember many strong complaints other than that. |
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