r/retroanime

So, The Vision of Escaflowne. I finally started watching this show.

It’s not like it was ever under my radar or anything, but for whatever reason I just never got around to it. I think by the time it really hit the US it was already on DVD through Bandai in the 2000s? I also vaguely remember that heavily cut Fox Kids version that existed for like five minutes, though I never actually watched it.

What finally got me interested was realizing this is a Sunrise show. Somehow I never connected that in my head before. I guess I always mentally filed Escaflowne under “girls anime” when I was younger, which is funny because over the years I’ve watched plenty of shoujo-oriented stuff and ended up loving it.

One thing that immediately stood out was how young Maaya Sakamoto sounds as Hitomi. Apparently this was basically her first major role, which is kind of wild considering how huge she eventually became. Between this, her music career, and all the roles she landed afterward like Aerith from Final Fantasy 7, she really had an incredible start. Makes me wonder what the circumstances were behind her getting cast in Escaflowne in the first place.

But honestly, what hooked me most were the giant mecha fights in a fantasy setting. That combination is just cool. Medieval kingdoms, swords, mysticism, dragons, fate/vision stuff, and then suddenly these massive armored mecha. It feels like Sunrise took a fantasy RPG world and injected it with 90s mecha anime energy.

Also, the soundtrack absolutely deserves the hype. Yoko Kanno was operating on another level here. Some scenes already feel elevated purely because of the music.

I’m still early into the series, but I can already see why people remember this one so fondly. It's just a shame I never watched it sooner because of it's late/slow start in the US. It was the 2000s and I was more interested in the current anime of that time than watching a show from 1996. Vision of Escaflowne has that very specific late-90s anime atmosphere that’s hard to explain unless you grew up around this era.

Curious how everyone here ranks Escaflowne compared to other fantasy/mecha anime from the 90s?