Back again, for post number two. I’m writing this just as we discovered the news that Crunchyroll are taking down a fair number of shows from their already-massive catalog. In North America, Escaflowne is aired on Funimation, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them (along with the likes of Amazon and Netflix) to seize on the chance of getting some licenses. Crunchyroll’s trials and tribulations are for another post, though; here is Escaflowne time, once again. So, where were we?
Even as the first cour wraps up, a lot of things go on as each episode goes by. The first 4 or 5 episodes saw Hitomi acclimatize herself to the world of Gaea, and getting used to being labelled as ‘the cursed girl from the Mystic Moon’. But these episodes that lead to the end of the first cour are starkly different than before. We’ve found out that it was in fact Van that was the angel in Hitomi’s visions, and not Allen, like she secretly hoped it was…although I think that her beloved Amano-senpai back home would have been a close second for her. We are still a little early on in the show after all, and Hitomi is still thinking a lot about how she misses her mom and her senpai and the track team and such. Here on Gaea though, Van reveals his past to Hitomi, in that his mother was a winged descendant of Atlantis, explaining how both he and Folken have wings too. Later on, as they arrive in Freid, things take a turn for the bizarre, when they meet the young prince Chid, who is also Princess Millerna’s nephew. As we soon find out, here in Freid the characters learn a lot more about themselves, and why the Empire is so eager to take hold of the secret power of the lost city of Atlantis.
Here in Freid, they also meet Zongi, a doppelganger loyal to Folken but who has his own agenda, and Miguel, a dragon slayer who was taken prisoner by Freid forces. Thanks to Zongi’s trickery, Van, Allen and everyone else are labelled as insurgents who want to take over the Kingdom. However, when Zongi tries to take Hitomi’s psychic powers for himself, he (and in turn we) see how much being on Gaea has heightened her senses and fortune telling.
Curiously enough, at this point in the show Hitomi finally starts to think more for herself. In past episodes, we’ve seen her as a vulnerable fish out of water. She’s been portrayed as someone who has been at everyone else’s convenience, as she has been able to predict their futures. When she has to be resuscitated in episode 11, her outlook changes, and later on, she decides not to help Van when he wants to know the location of a potential Zaibach attack. It’s when she gets the idea that the others are (kind of) taking her fortune telling for granted, and that’s why they’re keeping her around. And as this first cour wraps up, we understand why she’s feeling this way.
Hitomi is the fish out of water here, and just wants to go back home because she has nowhere else to be here in this strange world, she believes that by sticking with Van, Allen and co., she can find a way to go home. Back home in Japan, in episode 1, we see her as this average girl who has a massive crush on the track team captain, and so perhaps it has been this sudden switch to a life on Gaea that has made her into a completely different person. I wouldn’t call it ‘coming-of-age’, but we can definitely picture Hitomi being someone more aware and mature when she eventually does go back home.
I’ve been following Escaflowne in Japanese with subtitles, but every now and then, I switch over to the Bandai English dub, to remind myself on what I had been listening to when I originally watched the show way back when, and the voices I heard. Hitomi sounds like an average 90s schoolgirl, Allen’s voice actor sounds like he’s reading his script very slowly, and as for Dilandau?
Oh my…that was one thing I do remember clearly when I watched the show originally; how the Bandai dub voice of Dilandau was so very different compared to the original Japanese voice. While the original voice has them sound like someone pretty insane and sadistic (like an evil imperial general should sound), the Bandai dub voice has them sound like a angry little pre-teen boy who seems to have a vendetta against anything and everything. I’ve heard that Dilandau’s voice in the Funimation dub sounds a lot more refined and regal; a pity then that I won’t be able to hear it here in the UK. Now I’ve gotten used to the original Japanese voice more, I’m more hard-wired to Dilandau sounding sadistic and merciless. A shame then, because looking back now, Dilandau’s Bandai dub voice was just so ridiculously bad, it was good.
With the story progressing more, and the show having picked up a lot of pace (compared to the slow start it had in the early episodes), characters like Princess Millerna, Merle and even Dilandau play more of a bigger role in Escaflowne. There are a couple of plot twists that happen here at the end of the first cour, but I know of a massive one in the second cour that I didn’t see coming at all, and I certainly won’t be spoiling that…just yet. I’m happy with how this first cour ends though, in that the story in Escaflowne has gotten that much more detailed and interesting, and I can see more now how this became so popular in the West, as opposed to the lukewarm reception it got in Japan.
I’m also happy with how the characters are evolving here. I already mentioned Hitomi, and how she was getting tired of being a tag-along to the others, but there’s also Van and Allen to consider as well. We’ve seen how Van’s mother is a descendant of Atlantis, but we also see him as someone not so brash and naive as when we first saw him. And as for Allen? He still feels like he has some duty to protect not just Hitomi but the people around him too. In the last post, I wrote about the idea that he may be portrayed as the brother figure and role model to Van that Folken never gave him, but after the bombshell in episode 12 (concerning him and Prince Chid), his attitude changes slightly.
The third post of this series will see me begin the second cour, and what happens after episode 13 when we see Escaflowne mysteriously break down. Van is the only person able to control it, and so how is he affected by this? Where can the crew go when they’ve been absolved of their charges of being insurgents? Will I ever decide to go back to the Bandai dub and laugh at Dilandau’s ridiculous pre-teen voice again? Wait and see when Part 3 comes soon…
