Bandai Entertainment is set to launch the feature-length Escaflowne film into theatrical release on Friday, January 25, 2002.  Initially the film will open in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Vancouver prior to a Febrary, 2002 national roll-out.  A visually spectacular fantasy, Escaflowne features the work of animator Shoji Kawamori, who brilliantly blends romance and fantasy to tell the complex story of a contemporary high school girl who is thrust into Gaia, a strange new world of sword and sorcery, where she hold the key the battle between the rebels and the ruling Black Dragon Clan. 

 

Escaflowne began as a TV series, which many anime fans consider one of the very best done in Japan in the 1990s.  Originally slated for 39 episodes, the series was cut to just 26 in Japan, where it attracted considerable attention in 1996.  The American version (see 'Bandai to Release Big O') which ran for just 10 episodes on Fox was a near total abomination in which the sublime music of Yoko Kanno was replaced by techno-crap, and the episodes were re-edited to reduce the role of the series' female lead in order to make the show more successful with boys here in the States.  The movie version, which Bandai is releasing to North American theaters, appeared in Japan in 2000 and met with considerable success because it was able to capture much of the essence of the Japanese TV series.

 

The theatrical release of Escaflowne continues a trend that will inevitably raise the profile of anime here in America.  Escaflowne is debuting the same day that the Metropolis anime (see 'Tezuka's Metropolis') makes its theatrical bow.  Let's hope that Bandai and Sony/Columbia don't fall into a Disney/Dreamworks type of feud, since both Escaflowne and Metropolis are superb examples of anime and deserving of wide audience exposure.  At some point in the not so distant future an anime film will get a major nationwide release and have the same sort of successful run that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon had last winter.  Retailers can take advantage of the publicity surrounding the release of the Escaflowne theatrical film by offering the DVDs of the original Japanese TV series which are available from Bandai, and by stocking the Escaflowne anime collector sets which are available in the U.S. from Bandai America (see 'Bandai to Produce Anime Collector Sets').   The DVD edition of the Escaflowne theatrical film should be out in mid-summer of 2002.