Escaflowne-Volume 1: Dragons and Destiny (2000)

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General		Extras
Category	Anime	Main Menu Audio & Animation Alternative Version-Creditless Opening Music Video-Friend, Blue Eyes, Into The Light Gallery-Production Sketches (24) Trailer-Battle Doll:Angelic Layer; Heat Guy J;.hack//Sign; Initial D Trailer-Martian Successor: Nadesico - The Prince Of Darkness Trailer-Voices Of A Distant Star; Volcano High; Avalon DVD Credits
Rating
Year Of Production	2000
Running Time	92:57 (Case: 100)
RSDL / Flipper	Dual Layered	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Kazuki Akane
Studio Distributor	Sunrise, Inc. Madman Entertainment	Starring	Maaya Sakamoto Kelly Sheridan Tomokazu Seki Kirby Morrow Shinichiro Miki Brian Drummond Ikue Otani Jocelyne Loewen Minami Takayama Andrew Francis Joji Nakata Paul Dobson
Case	Amaray-Transparent-Secure Clip
RPI	$29.95	Music	Yoko Kanno Hajime Mizoguchi

    The first volume of a new anime series — always interesting, and usually fun, trying to work out what the series is about. The Vision of Escaflowne (or Escaflowne, for short) is no exception.

    In a nutshell, this is an epic. Oh, you want a somewhat bigger nutshell? Fair enough. Let's see what I can tell you without spoiling things too much.

    Our heroine is Hitomi Kanzaki. Hitomi is a high school student, and something of an athlete — she's on the school's track team, although one might well suspect that she has ulterior motives for being on the track team, given the crush she has on her sempai Amano. Hitomi's best friend, Yukari, teases her gently about her crush, referring to Amano as her "objet de drool" (I suspect that the subtitler may have taken a slight liberty there...). Hitomi reads tarot card fortunes for her friends as a bit of fun, but she seems to have some real psychic powers — she gets visions of what may happen.

    Hitomi's life is disturbed when a vision she had of a young man with a large sword suddenly appears in front of her. Worse, it is turned completely upside down when she finds herself drawn into a beam of white light with him and transported to another world.

    This is the world Gaea, from which it is possible to see both the Earth and our Moon (despite the fact that we cannot see Gaea from Earth) — they refer to Earth as "The Mystic Moon". Gaea seems to be in the city-state stage of civilization, with walled cities in competition with one another, and a few larger countries. They ride horses, and use swords, spears, bows, and siege weapons (catapults and arbalests, for example), but they have other very strange technologies. The two most obvious are guymelefs and a variety of flying vessels. The oddest part is their apparent lack of chemically powered projectile weapons (no guns, no cannons).

    What's a guymelef? It's a giant armoured self-powered fighting suit — a classic anime mecha, but somewhat out of place in an essentially mediaeval society. Try not to worry about it. It is not clear what powers the guymelefs — it's certainly a far more potent power source than any that was available on Earth at a comparable period of history (or even now!). It's odd to see giant armoured fighting suits fighting with swords.

    We meet a great many characters in these first few episodes, but I'll only list a limited number of them. In Gaea, Hitomi meets:

• Van, prince of Fanelia, a city-state. Van is young and impetuous, but well-meaning. He is the person who appears on Earth, and with whom Hitomi (unintentionally) returns to Gaea
• Merle, a girl who is part cat (complete with tail, pointed ears, and a tendency to clean herself with her tongue). She takes a rapid dislike to Hitomi because she is jealous (she cares a great deal for Van)
• Balgus, a swordmaster, and the man who has been training Van in martial skills
• Allen, a knight of Asturia, in charge of an outpost on the border near Fanelia
• Folken, a mysterious figure with access to some strange new technologies
• Dilandau, an ambitious, ruthless, and bloodthirsty young man (with a vicious streak a mile wide, and an annoying laugh) in charge of a flying fortress of the Zaibach Empire

    And what is Escaflowne? We don't learn the whole truth for quite a while, but it is a special guymelef, the historical property of the kings of Falenia. Van activates it (one gathers after a long period of inactivity) using a drag energist he obtained from a dragon. One thing we learn early, though, is that the name is pronounced "Eska flow nay".

    The episodes on this disc are:

    After watching the first disc, what do I think? To be honest, I'm not sure — a lot happens, and I'm sure it's all leading somewhere, but I'll have to see another disc to make a real decision. Still, it's no pain to make that choice, because the animation is fairly attractive (although oddly stylised, and with strange noses), the music is excellent, and the voice acting is fine (no outrageous choices of voice). So far, it looks very promising, and there are a lot of episodes to go — this series is 26 episodes long, and the R1 set runs to eight DVDs (yes, that means several discs with three episodes...), so there's plenty of time for the plot-lines to develop. I've received hints that there are some major developments to come. Be careful what you read on-line about this series, because there are some big spoilers out there.

Video

    This DVD transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1. It is not 16x9 enhanced. That's how this show appeared on television, so there is nothing to complain about there.

    The image is sharp in close-ups, but a bit soft in medium and long shots. It's clear enough to watch, but looks better on a smaller screen. There is no film grain, and only very occasional low-level noise.

    Colour is rather good. There are a great many scenes that use a predominance of one or two colours, but overall there's quite a decent palette on display, and it seems to be rendered quite well. There are no colour-related artefacts.

    There are no film artefacts of any significance.

    There's a lot of mild to medium aliasing, basically on any moving black line. And there's interleaving that's really noticeable when you pause on any shot with significant movement in it — it looks like this show was converted from NTSC to PAL using a less-than-perfect transfer (the R1 transfer, perhaps), and without enough care. It's not as bad as it might be, though, because this style of animation can withstand a fair level of interleaving. If you don't know what to look for, it doesn't look too bad when playing at normal speed, but pause and single-step look awful. It makes the closing credit roll hard to read, though. The opening credits are much easier to read because they fade in and out rather than rolling.

    There's only one set of subtitles, in English. As usual for anime, they don't match the English language dub, but one might assume that they are a more literal translation of the Japanese. In this case, I think they may be a more liberal translation, because they use quite a lot of informal language — I really don't understand how they managed to translate "sempai" as "captain", though.

    The disc is single-sided (with a nice picture label) and dual layered, but apparently not RSDL. The layer change is placed between episodes 2 and 3, and there's a bit of a pause as the player seeks, but it is on a black screen between episodes, so it's not disturbing.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The soundtrack is provided in English and Japanese, both in Dolby Digital 2.0, not surround-encoded, at 224 kbps. I watched all the episodes in both languages. The Japanese soundtrack sounds a bit richer (and a touch louder) than the English. Given my general preference for English dubs, this is quite an admission.

    The English dialogue is clear and easily understood. The Japanese dialogue sounds clear, but I really can't assess comprehensibility. Neither dub is perfectly matched to the animated mouth movements, which is a disappointment.

    The score is provided by Yoko Kanno and Hajime Mizoguchi. I generally like Yoko Kanno's work, and this is no exception. There's some use of mediaeval chants, which I like. The opening song is sung by the Japanese voice actress for Hitomi.

    These are pure 2.0 stereo soundtracks, with decent stereo imaging. The English soundtrack makes no use of the surrounds, even with surround decoding active. The Japanese soundtrack manages to dredge up some surround sound, but it's nothing special. Neither soundtrack uses the subwoofer.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

    The menus are animated with music. The menus are easy to navigate.

Credit-less Opening (1:32)

    This is the usual thing: the opening sequence, but without the credits over the top. It's a nice extra, once (please, not on every disc in the series!).

Music Videos (11:31)

    Three songs from the show (not that they have necessarily appeared on this disc). Be careful watching these, because one of them contains a spoiler you probably do not want to see before it appears in the series. The songs are:

• Friend
• Blue Eyes
• Into the Light

Production Sketches

    24 pages of sketches of characters from the show. Interesting.

Trailers: Madman Propaganda (10:58)

    Eight trailers, but presented one after another, rather than individually selectable in normal Madman fashion.

• Angelic Layer
• Heat Guy J
• .hack//SIGN
• Initial D
• Martian Successor Nadesico: Prince of Darkness
• Voices of a Distant Star
• Volcano High
• Avalon

    Note that the last two are live-action films from AV Channel's new line called Eastern Eye.

    The Region 1 version that I have is part of a limited edition box set, with eight DVDs in a flip-top box (quite an attractive box); the limited edition also includes an exclusive Escaflowne figurine. The first disc of the box set contains the same episodes as this R4 one. I don't like the R1 cover slick, partly because it contains a major spoiler; the Region 4 slick is rather more attractive, although it looks like it may have been drawn by a different artist — at least the R1 slick is in keeping with the show. Interestingly, the R1 slick uses the one-word title EscaFlowne, while the R4 says The Vision of Escaflowne; both have the volume title of Dragons and Destiny.

    The Region 4 disc is missing:

• folded piece of paper ("booklet") with some background information on dragons in Gaea.

    The Region 1 disc is missing:

• production sketches gallery
• soundtracks at 224kbps (R1 soundtracks are 192kbps)
• a second layer (R1 disc is single layer)
• attractive picture label (R1 has a simple text label)

    If you read the feature list for the R1, you might think that it lacks the credit-less opening. In fact, this is present, at the start of the music video segment. It has different trailers (for Gundam Wing, Cowboy Bebop, Haunted Junction, and Blue Submarine #6), but that's not important.

    The Region 1 transfer does not show interleaving like the Region 4, but it shows at least as much aliasing. At normal speed, the two are roughly equivalent to the eye, but I think the R1 is a little cleaner.

    All up, I find it hard to choose which is "better". I'm going to call it pretty much even.

    The first four episodes of an epic adventure in anime. Things are just starting, so it's hard to judge what it will be like.

    The video quality is adequate, but flawed by aliasing and interleaving.

    The audio quality is very good. This is one time when the Japanese track is slightly preferable.

    The extras are decent.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall