I bought a copy of the remastered Escalflowne movie BluRay on eBay, on the cheap. Despite it being a “grim retelling” of the series—those are almost as tedious and overworked as “feminist retellings”—I believe it still holds up 25 years later as its own story. As it didn’t have the runtime of its serialized counterpart, the movie version couldn’t have all of those disparate storytelling elements that I mentioned in the series’ review. What you have left is a tightened story with different versions of the same characters.
To wit, the BluRay extras included the original Japanese trailer and the English-language trailer for the re-release. The latter emphasizes Hitomi’s depression and the adventurous isekai narrative. In the former, YouTube’s auto-translate feature bungles a bit and omits the Japanese writing, but it focuses almost wholly on Hitomi and Van’s romance. This would be odd to western viewers because the couple barely had any physical contact throughout the whole movie. Not even a kiss. How they help each other grow is rather obvious, and though I’d consider it the B plot of the movie, it’s a very emphatic B plot. I want to say that “romance,” in the way the original trailer uses the word, doesn’t have quite the same meaning as it does to western audiences. Hitomi unwillingly teleports back to Earth at the end of the movie, at the apex of her and Van’s emotional connection. To the Japanese, that’s the perfect romantic ending, in the tradition of mono no aware, or the idea of profound impermanence. The height of the relationship is expressed through emotional undercurrents rather than an outright declaration of love. Western viewers would miss it entirely, or assume they were just really good friends who won’t see each other again, but the typical Japanese person knows that part is the crunchy katsu in their bowl of ramen. The uncomfortable incompleteness is the whole point. It’s worth noting the Escaflowne series also features a well-written mono no aware romance.