Escaflowne is certainly one of the most memorable anime around, for its emotional characters and its epic story with robots and warfare.
While the TV series, "Vision of Escaflowne," can tend to go overboard with emotional angst, there's a pretty good reason for this. The main character, Hitomi, is a girl with a pendant that can change the fate of an entire world, depending on her mood.
Of course, we can't possibly know how this pendant could work from the beginning. After all, in the beginning Hitomi is an ordinary high school girl who runs on the track team, likes to use tarot cards and has a crush on some guy named Amano.
Then some teenage guy appears out of an interdimensional portal, swordfighting a dragon. After a short chase sequence, Hitomi discovers that her pendant allows her to read the future. Hitomi ends up saving the guy, whose name is Van.
They then transport from Earth to Gaea, Van's home planet. He's given a warm greeting, for Van is now the new king of Fanelia, Van's hometown. However, the visit is cut short when the evil Zaibach army of Guymelef robots destroys the city. Van vows for revenge against the Zaibach.
To say the least, Hitomi's powers are the key to the fate of Gaea. Her pendant allows her to read the future, but whenever Hitomi is afraid, something awful is bound to happen. Of course, with powers like that, Hitomi ends up expressing a high range of emotions, resulting for some chaotic changes in the storyline itself.
However, no matter what, I can always sympathize with Hitomi, who has trouble expressing all her emotions in the first place. She would like to figure out the future, but when the future is altered by all the emotions she conceals inside her, she has to confess her feelings. She wants to love someone, but she's so afraid that someone else is going to get hurt in the process.
And while no one can really know what happens in the future, they have to learn to express their feelings honestly and truthfully. Ironically, this makes Escaflowne one of the best romance shonen anime. If anyone thinks that a romance film and an action film cannot possibly mix together, Escaflowne easily proves them wrong.
Image courtesy of http://www.theroseking.net/
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