Forum - View topicEva, Utena, Escaflowne and the Anime Encyclopedia
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Aaron White
Old Regular
Posts: 1365 Location: Birmingham, Alabama |
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I don't have it in front of me, but the Anime Encyclopedia's entry on Escaflowne says (to paraphrase from spotty memory) that posterity may judge Escaflowne to be the best of these three late Nineties anime hits because it maintained a consistant plot and didn't go all bonkers.
Weeellll... mebbe so, but that's related to why it's my least favorite of the three. Not that Escaflowne is bad or anything, but unlike Eva and Utena, it plays by the rules of its genre. Eva uses the Mecha genre as a Trojan Horse to infiltrate the commercial airwaves, then replaces it with an experimental philosophical drama, love it or hate it. Utena uses the Magical Girl genre as a springboard for nonlinear flights of fancy. But Escaflowne starts with Heroic Fantasy and sticks to the playbook. Which can make for well-crafted genre entertainment, and that's not a bad thing, but Eva and Utena take chances and have artistic ambitions beyond simply fulfilling our daily genre entertainment needs. Sometimes their reach exceeds their grasp, but I'd rather have imperfect yet innovative creative ventures than by-the-book escapism. (No warranty is expressed or implied regarding the accuracy, clarity or merit of the opinions expressed herein.) |
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garry
Former ANN Editor
 Posts: 120 |
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I have to say that Esca puts itself over Eva and Utena in that it succeeds more fully in its goals. Esca was a straightforward story, and it was made to entertain. It makes you love the characters, care about what happens to them, shows them change over time, and tells an epic story. There's no great underlying message, just that story.
Utena has a message to give, and pushed that message with hallucinatory imagery, roundabout storytelling, and a bit of talking right to the viewer. The point gets lost in the surrealism, though. Remember the cow episode? Evangelion was Anno opening his closet in front of a TV audience. There was a story of broken people in there that got tossed aside at some point in the middle to become a mishmash of allegory and pop psychology. Also, the surrealism became the point after a while. Esca was the most grounded in story, chugging along without overt symbolism or mind-jobs. Utena was wildly surreal, but kept to its goal in a roundabout way. Eva turned from mecha show to therapy session. There's a time to break open your toolbox and go nuts with your story, but I don't think it's as often as directors like to think. The mindset becomes "This is so complicated, it HAS to be good." Then you get stuff like Persona. This is all well and good for name-dropping film students. I prefer work I can actually enjoy. I prefer anime that stirs something inside of me. I used to like watching over-complicated movies, plays and shows because they made me feel smart. Now I'm all about Go Nagai and Sergio Leone. Now, don't take this as a defense of happy-faced crap like Chobits and Love Hina. Bad is bad. But weird doesn't mean good any more than simple means bad. |
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GATSU
Posts: 15550 |
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OMG Anime Encyclopedia sucks cus that British chick has an opinion and she doesn't like what I like, and she screwed up the episode count, and I can do better than her, but choose not to, because it's easier to complain than to get published, so I can laugh at her mistakes instead and send flame mail to Stonebridge Press!
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garry
Former ANN Editor
Posts: 120 |
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Need some Midol, Gatsu?
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GATSU
Posts: 15550 |
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Sorry, I was just making fun of the negative reactions the Anime Encyclopedia's gotten.
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Aaron White
Old Regular
Posts: 1365 Location: Birmingham, Alabama |
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Different strokes for different folks, I guess, but for me shows like Eva and Utena and movies like Persona capture to real non-linear nature of thought and reality in a way that the homogenized, pasturized linear narrative that is the norm in Hollywood and Escaflowne doesn't. Escaflowne is a labor of love, and a well-crafted work with splendid designs and some fine animation, so I'm not attacking it, but Eva and Utena demand active and contant mental engagement, which keeps me interested, and I never found them particularly difficult. I mean, if you get lost in the lightwieght complexity and surrealism of Eva and Utena, then how do you cope with the far greater difficulties of life? Art has been described as "machines for thinking," and Eva and Utena work quite well for me in that regard.
I've also never put much stock in the importance of "characters you can care about." I care about the characters in Eva and Utena, but I was bored by Escaflowne. Caring is too relative to be the basis for asthetic criteria. Who cares about Hamlet? Hamlet isn't a major work because the main character's so likable. |
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Shale
Posts: 337 Location: The Middle of Nowhere, DE |
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They're allowed to be opinionated. It's art, which is hard to appraise objectively. I just don't like when they're flat-out wrong (Trigun, SE Lain), or pass over popular, influential series because they don't like them (Tenchi and the throng of imitators).
And I too prefer both Eva and Utena to Escaflowne. Of course, all three are on my top five. |
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Aaron White
Old Regular
Posts: 1365 Location: Birmingham, Alabama |
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The Anime Encyclopedia is the best print resource of its kind, although I'd love to be proven wrong. Blurring the line between factual reference work and critical text is dodgy business; I'd prefer if they stuck to the facts and let me handle the harebrained opinions.
My other big crank about the book is that it doesn't cover art directors, who are just as important as animation directors; sometimes more so when the animation budget's about five bucks. |
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ANN_Bamboo
ANN Contributor
 Posts: 3904 Location: CO |
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Go Nagai is cool-- sometimes. There are some things that he does that are really good, like his robot stuff. But some of his other stuff I just can't stand. Anything with the title Devil in it is badly written, poorly timed-- not my favorites. And that one Kama Sutra hentai title he did, which is being released next year. ^-^;; |
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Tenchi
 Posts: 4534 Location: Ottawa... now I'm an ex-Anglo Montrealer. |
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I don't think there is such a thing as an "objective best" in terms of best anime, or best movie, TV show, book, comic or whatever. "Best" always is a subjective call based on whichever criterion the person making the evaluation feels is most important. It's like asking which one is the better film, Lilo & Stitch or Spirited Away? You ask 90% of people on anime boards or even some non-anime movie boards like RottenTomatoes.com, and they'll tell you Spirited Away, for various reasons, but if you ask me, it's Lilo & Stitch, simply because I enjoyed it more than I enjoyed Spirited Away, for reasons I can quantify (I like both the look of the characters and the watercolour backgrounds) and for subconcious reasons that elude me entirely. For me, I cannot divorce "best" from my own personal enjoyment (not that I'm suggesting that some people didn't enjoy Spirited Away more on a personal level), which is why most of my own, personal "best" anime are comedies like Urusei Yatsura, Kimagure Orange Road, Tenchi Muyo, You're Under Arrest and Sailor Moon, but other people's opinion of "best" may be based on how philosophical or deep or or obtuse or "important" (another subjective call) an anime is. The good thing is that those sort of fans aren't wrong and neither am I, even if what we consider "best" is radically different.
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