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Yes it's a wartime propaganda film, but one that spends as much time with cute animal soldiers packing and eating their bento lunches as it does with any fighting. It's only in the last fifteen minutes of runtime that there's any War at all. There are also extended scenes of singing alphabet songs, hanging laundry and feeding birds.

The animation is amazing, of course continuity is a little jumpy which considering the conditions of it being made make sense, so a lot of the scenes have little jumps and skips in the motion. Still the movement is remarkably three dimensional, and the characters have very expressive ... facial expressions.

When compared to the Disney wartime movies, these one lacks the coherent plots and punchy action and quick gags. It's all rather hallucinatory, slow moving and brilliant in its own way, but definitely not one for all tastes.

Honestly I thought the fact files at the end of Inferno Cop were funnier than the main show. The main show feels a lot like a Japanese take on Adult Swim humor, which is fine but not my favorite thing. However these felt a little stranger than that.

The Fact Files are pretty much one joke repeated over and over, but I got a pretty good laugh every time when they would reveal some stupid little detail about a bit character and the chugging Fact File remix soundtrack puts me in a good mood every time I hear it.

You can't watch them in isolation from ... the main show, but they provided for me, some of the biggest laughs for Inferno Cop.

This reminds me of going to giant Buddhist temples when I was travelling Sri Lanka and took those memories and added robots, cute girls and thugs. Super cool!

I probably enjoyed this more than most would as I've long been interested in science fiction looks at religion. So this light sci-fi OAV short with a reincarnated temple priestess and giant Buddha (daibutsu) robots scratched a rare itch for me.

There's nothing particularly deep here, it's just an innocent and pleasant romance with pretty cool art and animation. It's really the depiction of future Buddhism (which looks a lot like current Buddhism, which makes sense given that it ... has been around for a long time) that makes me love it. If that seems neat to you, you probably enjoy, otherwise there's other stuff that might be better worth your time.

I read that this was going to be Central Park Media (US Manga Corps) first release and I remembered seeing it in the Diamond Catalog for comic shops way back in the day. It got pulled due to media outrage about this new animated style of Japanese pornography.

After watching it I can say, don't expect it to be the porn it was accused of being, it's actually like an 80s Lum episode with a few not sexy sex scenes added and the sexual humor ramped up a few notches. That said, it's pretty funny and the characters are madcap, over the top and a ... lot of fun in a way that exemplifies that specific 80s style. I watched it for its history but ended up enjoying it more than expected, there's a good number of laughs and I personally love 80s anime, so the art and animation work for me.

Edited to add: I'm actually going to up my score to an 8, because there's a scene in here (it starts inside a tank) that I'm still laughing about half a day later, and few comedies ever crack me up that much. The humor is crude, but dang it really is funny!

This series seemed a little muddled in what it was trying to do. It used many of the tropes of post Gundam mecha shows, but with no real idea what to say with them. As a result there were moments of great fun, but never soared to the heights of its more famous siblings.

Personally, I think the show would have done better letting the silliness factor take charge more often than the action drama. My favorite episodes were definitely those which highlighted the soap opera aspects of the show and minimized the space opera. The lives and loves of the Southern Cross moments were a ... ton of fun. The triple form of the Zor and the political in fights between bald bad human and dad general paled in comparison to watching Jeanne get "in your face" about winning a decisive battle for the sole purpose of buying a dress.

The character designs were good, but the mecha designs seemed kind of chunky and didn't quite work. I liked the Zor ship interiors and some of the other background stuff was cool too. Overall the design was a mixed bag in my eyes.

I started out loving the music but there came a point when it's constant recycling offered diminishing returns. I think you could fit all the background music used in the entire show into 20-30 minutes of content.

Overall, I'm an old school anime fan and don't regret buying the DVD and spending the time watching it. However, unless you're like me and love 80s anime, there's probably not enough here to recommend the show,

Warning there will be some spoiles for both the movie and the show Escaflowne in the brief review that follows. Before I get to that, I'll give a capsule review: this is a very nice movie that takes the characters and basic plot structure of the TV show and crafts them in a way to talk about an entirely different set of themes. To get the most out of the movie some familiarity with the characters will be helpful, however being too tied to characters behaving and doing the same things as they did in the show will invariably lead to disappointment.

SPOILERS AHEAD (I can ... only talk about the themes of the show and movie with the aid of spoilers, I'll minimize plot spoilers as best as possible)

This is an interesting movie as the overall primary relationships between the characters from the show and those in the movie are largely the same. Of course, anyone outside of Hitomi and Van get considerably less to do, but such are the time constraints of a 90 minute movie compared to a twelve hour show. However thematically the story of the movie is used to talk about something very different than did the show.

The TV show seemed to show us that man's attempt to change and control fate and destiny, even when its done for pure reasons, has unintended destructive side effects. It isn't so much a free will versus determinism argument as much as it is a warning against trying to get too tangled in controlling fate, lest you get bit.

The movie however, doesn't go there at all and instead is a story about suicide and loneliness. There's a sort of fictional logic to the idea that a young girl on earth's desire to kill herself would hold the fate of an entire fantasy world in thrall. Here Hitomi is a very sad and lonely girl who lives life and yet is untouched by it. Her yearning for extinction is what draws her to Gaea, and through the process of meeting Von and realizing that she doesn't want him to want to die, she sees the value of life. The message here is very much about the power of choosing to live even through times of pain and how even though we are alone, within love we are also united.

I think both themes and stories are valid and I love how the same director returned to the well and brought up very different results. I'm curious to see if the manga offers a similarly diverse look at the same root material.

This reminds me of the super macho anime of the 90s updated for millennial sensibilities. Modernized so that female characters are kick ass and not worthless, the animation suits modern standards and there's no random rape scenes. However the male leads still talk Eastwood tough, there's amazing violence, there's woman in tiny robes, swearing, tons of swords and guns and skull faced robot action. Plus the music is amazing metal and demands very loud playback. This anime won't change your life, but hot damn it all to hell if it's not a barrel of fun!

Bonus points for the army general in episode three whose ... design is pure classic Go Nagai cartoon look, despite the fact that no one else I the series looks like a 70s cartoon character.

I can see a Hollywood exec being wowed by the elvator pitch you could make about this "It's Fast and the Furious meets Guardians of the Galaxy" This could be adapted into a popular summer Hollywood movie. It's got great action, unbelievably good character designs, an easy to understand plot, fun characters and it's filled with fun.

That said, a Hollywood adaptation would probably add unnessecary subplots, cut down on the action, make it less weird and cut the topless scene - so let's be happy that this is what it is- a near perfect anime action masterpiece!

Also, the bluray picture and sound are magnificent. ... Watch it with your sound system cranked for maximum pleasure.!

I view this as a somewhat strange Pure land Buddhist fable about the awakening of what is, in everything but name, a Buddha into the modern world. Yep, there's tentacle rape and all of that, but there's not enough sex for it to work as porn. For me the sex simply makes sense if you're going to tell a story about the demon world trying to keep the birth of Chojin at bay. Demons are pure id; sex and violence are the norm within that mythical context.

The ending is something I cannot imagine coming out of a western movie. I won't go into details, ... but if you expect love to win you might disappointed. And yet I wouldn't call it nihilistic either, and that is what makes this movie so fascinating to me. I can't say ideologically/thematically I've seen anything quite like it.

I saw it around 1990 or so on a bootleg VHS that was called Wandering Kid. Later I had it on proper release but I haven't seen it for probably over 20 years. Needless to say most what I'm picking up on went well over my head back then. It's rare for something to age so well IMO.