Rate The Last Movie You Saw

Avengers: Endgame (2019)



Here's to Benioff and Weiss landing their plane this well.

Doctor Strange
(2016)
3.5/5

The Da Vinci Code
(2006)
3/5

Escaflowne (2000) - First Time via FunimationNow
Went into this not entirely sure what to expect and it blew me away. The world it creates is so very fascinating and so very threatening. The animation is amazing. I love the old-school cel animation style used here. It's hard to believe an anime from 2000 is this grainy (almost as much as Akira) when it seems like everything after 1995 is so focused on being shiny. But you know what? It's a perfect match for the film's gritty tone, so I'm not complaining. In fact, I wish more anime used this style even today. Yoko Kanno, of Cowboy Bebop fame, gives us another pitch-perfect musical score here. The story is amazing, too, and it's also very well-paced, the high stakes well-defined within its 100-minute runtime. Being able to care what happens to the characters doesn't hurt, either. Okay, so about the dub now. There's actually two and as with the two Akira dubs, different fans hold different opinions. There's the dub Ocean produced in 2004 and the one Funimation produced in 2016. I can't comment on the Ocean dub without having heard it, though it has some good voice actors in its roster like Ukyo Kuonji (and Sango) herself Kelly Sheridan as Hitomi, Naraku (and Happosai) himself Paul Dobson as Folken and girl-type Ranma herself Venus Terzo as a supporting character named Millerna, but the Funimation dub is flawless from top to bottom. Haruhi Fujioka (and Maya Ibuki) herself Caitlin Glass is perfect as Hitomi Kanzaki, the depressed teen who feels like simply fading away until she ends up in Gaea, a world that sits beneath the Earth and the Moon, which is to say in way over her head when people start calling her the wind goddess. Granted, I'm biased since Glass is one of my favorite voice actors. Fun fact: in Japanese, Hitomi is voiced by Maaya Sakamoto (think she comes from my paternal grandmother's family) who would later voice Haruhi Fujioka in Ouran High School Host Club. Aaron Dismuke is also excellent as Van, the king without a people to lead. Tamaki Suoh himself Vic Mignogna isn't the first I'd think of as Van's insane brother Folken, but he pulls it off a lot better than I thought he would, especially since Tamaki doesn't have a single evil bone in his body. The rest of the cast is also excellent and the dub script is completely natural. It's also pretty cool that they left the villagers' chants in Japanese rather than dubbing them. Overall, considering the dub coupled with a fine HD transfer, Funimation couldn't have done better by Escaflowne. The movie deserves the treatment they gave it, too, and if it turned out this good, I can hardly wait to check out The Vision of Escaflowne the TV series this is an alternate version of and which Funimation also redubbed and presented uncut in English for the first time. Some have criticized the film for the changes it makes, notably the tone and some changes to the character designs, apparently, but I don't see why the two can't coexist as companion pieces. After all, seeing this one made me want to check out the original show so that has to count for something. I might not know exactly what I'll think of the show just yet, though I get the feeling I might end up enjoying it nearly as much, but I think I'll definitely be coming back to the movie many times in the future.