on American television
Whereas the original Japanese productions of Pokemon and Digimon were intended for young children in the 6-11-year-old age group, Escaflowne is an anime series originally intended for a teen and adult audience. Airing after Digimon as a part of the FoxKids Saturday morning line-up resulted in a lot of editing for the Japanese show to make it appropriate for the younger audience.
In Escaflowne 15-year-old Hitomi is running on a school track when a boy carrying a sword appears in front of her, soon followed by a dragon. After the boy manages to kill the dragon, he and Hitomi are transported back to his world, Gaea. Hitomi soon discovers that the boy is Prince Van, and he killed the dragon in order to take the throne of his country. Van isn’t king for long before an invisible army conquers his kingdom in search of Escaflowne, a mechanized suit of armor that only Van can operate. Hitomi and Van escape the destruction with Escaflowne, with many adventures to follow, many of which are foreseen by Hitomi’s increasingly accurate ability to tell fortunes.
Escaflowne is a fantasy in the manner of Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings, with the action and adventure to match. Beautifully animated, the series contains complex characters and a well-constructed narrative. At least, the original Japanese version, titled The Vision of Escaflowne, did. The FoxKids version, edited for the attention spans, interests, and moral education of 6-11-year-olds, omitted scenes and images that are a bit too adult for the target demographic. Only a trickle of blood remained from the sword fights, and icky hints of romance between the various main characters are smoothed over. Flashbacks were inserted to remind children what has happened before, and foreshadowing was omitted, on the grounds that children won’t make the connections when the foreshadowed events occur. And yet the FoxKids version was charming, exciting and involving.
The FoxKids version was so intriguing to me that I began looking for more information about the series on the Internet, where I learned about the Japanese version and the edits that had been made to the series to transform it into a show suitable for 6-11-year-old children. I began to want to see the original so I ordered a subtitled box set from Amazon.com. The FoxKids version will soon be released on VHS, and the dubbed in English but unedited version will be released on DVD.
In watching the unedited version, I’ve been amazed at the beauty of the animation, the complexity and subtlety of the narrative and the characters and amazed that FoxKids ever thought this could be a show for young children. The series is brilliant, beautiful, moving, and shocking. It’s on the level of The X-files, Millennium, or Brimstone, to name Fox’s darkest dramas, and yet the network saw animation and decided that it was for children. There are episodes in the original that must have been nightmares for the FoxKids editors, key scenes when Van is near death and covered in blood, scenes that had me too scared to go to bed after turning off the tape.
The edits resulted in a disjointed story that failed to find its audience. Although the series completed its run in Canada on YTV, it was canceled in the United States after several episodes. The uncut episodes are available on DVD, however, and they’re well worth picking up. If you do, you’ll be watching one of the best animation series I’ve ever seen.