tspence

I found this movie dull as tripe. I could constantly recognize that the people on the screen were trying to make jokes, but why? What purpose did these attempts at humor have?

It didn't help anything that the movie was edited as if it were a sequence of stock footage spliced together at random. One scene would not lead into another; you would just suddenly be wherever the cameraman happened to wake up.

The movie probably had what the writers thought would be running gags. A cat in the operating room! The surgeon goes "Somebody get that cat out of here!" Laughs and hijinks, right? ... Without the comic timing, it goes nowhere. The cat joke is repeated over and over, each time seeming like a throwaway line that desperately wants to be funny.

Perhaps the only way to laugh at this movie is to think of the poor investors who lost money on this film.

The director and script writer of Escaflowne, Shoji Kawamori, was a big part of the original Macross anime (nee Robotech, as it was called in the USA). Macross/Robotech was widely recognized as a pivotal moment for animation in the USA; definitely one of the best filmed entertainment ever. Now, imagine if Shoji Kawamori spent fifteen years after working on Macross carefully refining his technique, practicing and perfecting his storytelling abilities. Imagine if the greatest living musician on the face of the Earth, Yoko Kanno, was then contracted to produce a four-cd soundtrack for Kawamori's next production. That, then, is what Escaflowne is; the greatest work of some of the greatest artists ever.