Escaflowne: The Movie

I've just finished watching the entire series of Escaflowne and then the movie, and I must say that it was a let down (though not unexpected).

On the one hand you have a quality movie - great animation, more violence and adult themes than the series would allow and already complex characters (as they were taken from the series' in their totality, rather than their presentation at the beginning). On its own this movie had every potential to be great - decent story world and concept, the problem is that it fell into the limbo of relying on the series too much and too little.

The first half of the movie is truly a great watch - you see old faces and nods to secondary characters (the cats in the nightclub are a nice touch). The problem is that in the second half it sort of falls apart - it seems to lose focus and rely on clichés and poor on screen chemistry for the lovers.

The reason for this is that the first hour or so pretty much relies on the first few episodes of the series - girl meets boy but is afraid, the world itself is introduced and so forth, but in the last hour they try to cram the remaining 24 episodes of plot into the movie. While they negate a large amount of the less relevant details in the series, the fact that they try to throw a love that only develops at the end of 24 episodes of questioning (Between Hitomi and Van) into about 30 minutes, and it just seems forced.

So in the end the movie would've been better had it not relied on the overreaching plot of the series and made its own way in the world. (or maybe do the opposite and be set at the end of the series like the Evangelin movies).

At any rate, I did feel a little cheated by the apparent lack of mech fights and 'brother battle' at the end. 3/5