Tunnel into Moria?

Political machinations that, yet again, make no sense.  Just Plain Evil “loose cannon” villain goes on a rampage, which everyone in the universe could have seen coming.  Yes, let’s put mentally deranged children in charge of entire armies; it’s clearly the right move for our empire…

Hitomi rides an absurd roller coaster of infatuation with Allen, then gets kidnapped and saved.  Gotta have some kind of action in this episode I suppose.  The implication is that she’s being abducted into the king’s harem by mercenaries, which is kinda intense for a kid’s show.  The catgirl is instrumental in her rescue and shows serious bravery, and is also the most expressively animated of all the characters.  It’s fun how they stylize her movements – and only hers – using flourishes from manga that cross the border between illustration and animation, and 2-d and 3-d space.

I went back and re-watched some of this with the English dub instead of the original Japanese voices, and though part of the problem is certainly the too-literally translated script, all the voices except possibly the insane child are just ATROCIOUS.  Like, they feel dead wrong for the characters.  Hitomi needs to sound feminine and a bit breathless to sell the Snow-White-adjacent nature of the character.  In the English dub she sounds like … a mid-level manager at a software company, whose vacation is going a bit weird.  Glad I’m avoiding the dub.

A couple of notes here, past the two hour mark since these are effectively 20-minute episodes when you cut out the credits:  The soundtrack by Yoko Kanno, which spawned three albums (at least) and is a grand and inventive collection of music and was quite popular on its own, is strangely under-used.  Some themes feel out of place, and many others have been chopped up into small cues and then used inconsistently.  I really didn’t expect that.  The show is not a good showcase for the music, and I’m left wondering how the music got so popular.

And the other note:  Without the soundtrack, I have to admit that Vision Of Escaflowne is not actually a standout show.  It certainly moves along, but the animation directors just don’t locate enough of those moments of wonder, or epic scale, that a colorful alternate world could potentially deliver.  The only thing that keeps it a draw for me is a personal thing:

I only saw a few pieces of it when I was a teenager, and then it sank below cultural awareness for me except for the soundtrack.  But I must have been exposed at exactly the right time, because the general look of Hitomi – a slightly mopey but earnest girl with short brown hair, big curious eyes, a lithe runner’s body, and a tendency to shoot her mouth off and get into trouble – is weirdly attractive to me.  It feels like she’s an archetype, but of what exactly, I don’t know.  She’s not a coiffed and poised princess, she’s not a fawning and alien catgirl, she’s not gregarious, she’s not very wise (at least for these first seven episodes), and frankly, she’s not particularly smart either.  So what is it that I like?  Just the short hair, the big eyes, the gumption, and the shapely legs?  Man, I am a slut.