Glasgow-based distributor Anime Limited released three royally decorated Blu-ray boxes this week, and we're covering all of them. Yesterday saw the pretty wooden box of the Miss Hokusai release, tomorrow we'll look at Fullmetal Alchemist, but today we check out The Vision of Escaflowne.
One of the classic anime series of the nineties, The Vision of Escaflowne is a great mish-mash of genres, starting as a teen school romance before plunging into fantasy, and evolving into hardcore science fiction. I mean, steam-punk flying dragon harnesses? Whoa!
However, the mish-mash turned out great, helped by great characters, great design, excellent music, and prudent use of those newfangled-yet-pretty (at the time) cgi techniques. To this day, the series has a lot of fans. I must resist the urge to launch in a full-scale review here.
But this is not a review. It is a look at the packaging job Anime Limited did on this, their Escaflowne Ultimate Edition box, which houses both the series and the 2000 movie it spawned. Here is a gallery of shots. Click on the edge of the pictures to scroll through them, or at the center of each to see a bigger version.
And here it is: a big tough cardboard slipcase.
Inside the slipcase are a hardcover artbook and a box with... boxes.
All boxes taken out, and they're all slipcases themselves.
Ehm... does that mean this set is basically the King of the slipcases?
All contents taken out of their slipcases. We have three digipaks: the series on Blu-ray, the movie on DVD and Blu-ray, and the soundtrack CDs.
All digipaks opened. That's a lot of discs!
All slipcases, boxes and digipaks also have reverse artwork, so here is the entire set turned over.
A note on one of the digipaks: The Vision of Escaflowne is rightfully known as having a great soundtrack, and this set contains the full three-disc CD music release from twenty years ago. This is an absolutely fantastic extra, and it's very cool to see it included in here!
Here is the reason why the set has to use an oversized outer box: the big artbook. It's a hardcover one, and at 148 pages it's pretty damn nice.
A peek inside the artbook reveals character sketches, posters, schematics for the mechs, landscape art... the works!
The (back) end of another fine, fine special edition, a classic series treated right. Well done, Anime Limited!
Expect it to be seriously overshadowed tomorrow though, when we cover Anime Limited's rather insane release of the original (not-Brotherhood) Fullmetal Alchemist!