your favourite japanese movie?

[Xanatos]

I loved the series of Escaflowne, but the movie didn't have the same appeal for me. In fact, I greatly hated what was done in the movie. I guess it (the movie) was supposed to be a "revisioning" of the series, but I did not care for what was changed at all, particularly what happened to the characters!

Hitomi in the series was pretty well-adjusted to the things going on around her, but in the movie she was portrayed as some suicidal and helpless thing, and was just really hard to like as a character for me. Vaan was reduced to being a brooding and blood-thirsty warrior, and his brother was portrayed as the main villain? No no no no no no.... You barely saw Allen and Dilandeau, both of whom where my favorites in the series, so I was disappointed by that a great deal, but I guess I understand why. I mean, it's a movie. You can't expect everything/everyone to be as fleshed out as they are in the series.

I guess I will say that the fight sequences were cool, and I liked some of the new character designs, but those alone aren't really what I wanted to see in a movie adaptation of one of my favorite anime series. Oh, and the music was good as well, but with Yoko Kanno doing the work (for both the series and the movie), how could it not be?

So I suppose in closing, I just wanted to get out the fact that although I was a big fan of the series, the movie did little to no justice for it whatsoever for me. Maybe other people liked it, but I certainly did not.

Sorry for being a nitpick about one of your movie picks there Xan! But I think that if anyone was a fan of the series like I was, they would have the same reaction to the movie.

Actually, it's not my favorite so don't worry about it, overall I think it's a good movie, worth watching but then again I never was a big fan of Vision of Escaflone to begin with so the changes didn't bother me that much. I find those changes kinda amusing, this may sound strange but somehow it reminded me of Star Trek, in few episodes of Voyager and the new Enterprise they completely change crews personality almost in the same way as in Vision of Escaflone, so basically I'm used to seeing this already.

But I must admit you got point there Dodie, especially when it comes to the characters. It all comes to how much you like the changes they made.