The Vision of Escaflowne

Synopsis

Hitomi Kanzaki, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl who enjoys tarot and fortune-telling, finds her mundane life upended when a boy named Van Fanel plunges from the sky alongside a fierce dragon. Using her ability to see glimpses of the future, Hitomi helps Van vanquish the dragon, but the two are then engulfed by a ray of light and transported to Gaea, a mystical realm where Earth hangs in the heavens. Once there, Hitomi learns that Van is the prince of the Kingdom of Fanelia, which faces imminent danger from the malevolent Zaibach Empire. To protect his realm, Van pilots his family's legendary guymelef, Escaflowne—a mighty mechanized armor suit—but he cannot prevent Fanelia's downfall. Fleeing the devastation, Hitomi and Van meet Allen Schezar, a handsome knight from Asturia who bears an uncanny resemblance to a boy Hitomi admired back on Earth. As they gather more companions, Van and Hitomi struggle against the Zaibach Empire, whose goal is to awaken an ancient and dangerous power.

Background

Escaflowne was originally planned to be a 39 episode series, but after cuts to its budget and an extensive reworking of the plot, the show was reduced to a 26 episode run. Due to time constraints, certain footage in earlier episodes were cut during its broadcast and later restored on the Japanese home video releases, referred to as the Director's Cut. The North American Bandai Entertainment releases used the TV masters, so their English dub does not sync properly with the Japanese home video masters on those specific episodes. FUNimation later licensed the series and, in 2016, launched a successful Kickstarter to redub the entirety of the Director's Cut edition.