Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Mech Week : Escaflowne

Well it is kinda mech week, I know I'm not up to schedule my life doesn't let me post as much as I should I suppose went on a good stride but fell off it the closer the weekend loomed in. Anyways, decided to cut the list one post short and fuse it into well my next post that I'll do to officially wrap up the mech theme. It is a little shorter because I realized I was pulling of story bits from wikipedia...

On with this post! Escalflowne is maybe the first anime I ever watched, not exactly sure about that I can't seem to remember my exact first, sometimes I remember it as Dragonball Z and sometimes it's Escaflowne. All I know that Escaflowne was the first animated show that I realized that it was "different" from other animated shows, so in that respect I sense that it was the first to realize that it was an anime of sorts. Even so, the version of Escaflowne I watched as a kid was edited by fox. I think it was their first attempt at bringing anime to north america, and sincerely they haven`t changed their methods since. They horribly butchered it into tiny little incomprehensible pieces of garbage, intensively remind us of current events with flashbacks of five minutes ago, stripped down dialog, removal of any graphic violence at all and a whole collective of the removal of everything appealing. Now for the time I loved the show, because I didn`t know any better, I haven`t even watched the original series yet I simply watched the movie which is based on the series and I really enjoyed it. It shook my mind a bit seeing all that violence, but it was so awesome. Back then you really had to dig if you wanted to find anything of value on the internet, youtube wasn`t around to solve those missing videos problems. The cool thing is that back then I was into to the high fantasy stuff and this was simply amazing to look at, I still prefer the late 90's anime styling there's something about it that so appealing.

Now I won`t be talking about the story or the characters in general because I only have vague memories of the series that aired on YTV back in 2000 (I was like 10, oh my), even with those it was pretty much butchered by the american censorship and parents who didn't want to discipline their own children. So I'm rescaling it all from the movie which is still way far back but I do remember how much the mechs are badass.

This is the first time I ever saw a mech in a fantasy environment, and from my knowledge it is the only one, but I'm sure there must be at least a few more lying around the anime compendium. So this mech is created from an ancient technology (unknown techno and as always; a wizard did it), and it has one of the most awesome power sources ever created; a dragon heart. So that's where the series starts out with the protagonist fighting a dragon for its hearth so he can power his mech named Escaflowne. First of the user needs to drip his own blood into the dragonhearth so it can fuse together and power the mech so it knows which user to fuse with, it wasn't exactly explained from what I remember but from deduction it seems like that. Sincerely this is the most brutal way to drive mech ever, if you think a direct link to your mind in Neon Genesis was bad, think again. In Escaflowne no physic links, this weird gooey material wraps your arms and legs connecting to the motor function and then these liquid metal rods are shoved into your neck and colar bone area for the mind I suppose. Really brutal and really messy, the first time he hooks and starts moving, some of the most disgusting sounds come out of the whole thing. Forces it too much and blood will come spewing out, because you know those spike are directly shoved into your neck area.

Since it is placed in a fantasy world there aren't any giant lazorz to interrupt the fight scenes. Instead of giant war battles, which they do have a bit, it concentrates more on one on one battles, sword battles to be more specific. Again, there simply something so cool, seeing two towering mech having a sword battle, you can feel the giant impact the blades take on. The main mech Escaflowne has one main sword weapon and another small blade, but it also has the capability to transform into a dragon shaped mech and fly. While the main mech is cool and all I really like the others too, they have this liquid metal that can be shaped into almost any weapon and even shoot out like tentacles and stuff, even some of them are equipped with flametrowers for some cool dragonbreath attacks.

As for the mechs themselves they're really fun to look at, they have this have mechanized and half living feature to them. They don't really look like advanced technology like other mechs but more or so simply a giant armor and the crystals add a very nice touch to it all. Oh and most of them wear capes, so it's an automatically win on my list. Imagine what size of frikin capes you would need to fit that on a giant mech! Picture below gets you a good look at it all. Click on it too see the rest there's another one on the right side.

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