arnest, plain Hitomi Kanzaki is an ordinary high school student with no problems more serious than her unresolved crush on the track team captain. At least, until the barrier between her world and a nearby one breaks down. Suddenly, she's swept into a turbulent land called Gaea, where knights fight dragons with swords and battle each other in powerful mecha. Earth hangs visibly in the sky at night, and Hitomi is regarded as an object of superstition, as an inhabitant of "the Mystic Moon."
The natives have fairly good reason to be suspicious of Hitomi. The balance of power in Gaea is shifting, as the lunatic servant of an evil emperor uses a dangerous new technology--high-powered flying mecha with cloaking devices--to burn entire countries. The apparent goal is the destruction of Escaflowne, a particularly powerful transforming mecha bonded by blood-pact to the king of one of the destroyed countries. Caught in the middle of a traumatic civil war, Hitomi experiences strange, intense visions of the future, often just in time to help alter events for the better.
To some extent, Hitomi's emotionally lost among all the grand posturing and violent activity of kings, knights and emperors competing for military dominance. She finds herself carried helplessly along by the wave of events, concentrating more on her own brief infatuations than on her separation from her home planet. But her strange abilities and the mysterious pendant she wears clearly mark her as a key player in the grand scheme of Gaea.
An abridged epic
Initially, the story of Escaflowne appeared on Japanese TV as a 26-episode series, also available in its entirety from Animevillage.com. This digest edition reduces the entire series to under three hours, condensing eight or nine episodes onto each of three tapes. Naturally, the story line suffers considerably. Escaflowne is an intense and complex series, full of dramatic twists and building suspense, and this sharply abridged version reduces events to a choppy series of vaguely connected highlights. There's no narration or explanation; each scene is slashed to its bare minimum or eliminated entirely, so that the story follows logically but with no depth.
Even the series' most impressive visuals are given short shrift. The gorgeously dynamic early dragon-slaying scenes, which launch the series from a mundane teen romance into an interplanetary epic, are featured as a few bare before-and-after shots. The terrifying mecha battle that destroys Escaflowne's kingdom is glossed over in seconds. A laudable effort was clearly made to give the Best Collection a coherent, linear story line rather than making it into a disjointed moving picture gallery, but neither the plot nor the animation comes out to best advantage in these sparse edits.
If this were a single tape, it might be useful simply as an overview of a strong series, or as the functional equivalent of an extended theatrical preview. But at three hours and $75 for the full series, the Best Collection is mostly a pricey and pointless substitute for the real thing.
