I struggled through this rather yawn-inducing, confused anime movie. It started promisingly enough, but at 15.00 minutes I was watching a schoolgirl inside a giant mechanical piece of body armour, at 24.00 minutes a cat-girl turns up for no reason at all, and I just thought "Oh God, this is why I had to stop watching anime for nearly five years".

Fair enough, the body armour (the Escaflowne of the title) doesn't occupy a lot of screen-time, but that whole mecha schtick just reminded me too much of the procession of dreary, puerile anime titles I saw during the 90's.

As it turns out there are some nice touches to Escaflowne, but the overwhelming sense is of an epic story being crammed against its will into a 97 minute film, and consequently having no room to breathe, or, it must be said, even to make very much sense. I got the general gist of the thing, but too many of the details were just never explained, or tossed off so quickly that you don't even realise they're important at the time. The main character is whisked away from Earth to this mystery planet to be the Wind Maiden... why exactly? I don't mean why in terms of her function when she gets there, I mean why her at all? That's a pretty big detail.

There's nothing desperately awful about Escaflowne, but there's just nothing very good about it either. I must say I haven't seen the series, and perhaps that was a more satisfying effort, with more room to stretch its legs and get you familiar with the characters and the complexities of this alternate world.

Perhaps the best feature of the movie is Yoko Kanno's music, whch is very good as always, though not as impressive, I thought, as in 'Cowboy Bebop' or 'Wolf's Rain' - but then again, perhaps it's just because both of those series are much more impressive in general.

There's the usual problem too with the English voice cast, who sound like the same wooden bunch of voice actors who seem to have voiced 90% of anime you've ever heard since 1986.

Some people will love the movie, I'm sure, and I suspect most of those people will be in their mid-teens. This is, to my mind, the big problem which gets in the way of my enjoying so much anime. Most major western animated features are aimed simultaneously at two audiences: kids, and their parents, so they tend to function on more than one level. Many Ghibli films follow a similar formula, but in general Anime is aimed squarely at teens, and it tends to show up in an impressive complexity of plot, but lack of maturity in other areas. It isn't suitable for your 6 year olds, and not many 40 year-olds are going to find it interesting. The ones worth watching are ones that trancend this limitation, or which are just so damn good that you can live with the fact that they don't. Unfortunately this isn't one of them.