Hell Yeah Escaflowne

For the TV series, I tried to build quality into Gaea’s world view as much as possible. This entailed the distribution of Gaean animals like the ground dragons that Mr. Mahiro Maeda designed, the languages of Gaea, units of measurement, currency, a calendar system, local customs, and the establishment and history of its nations. Of course, all of those factors were not going to be drawn on a chart or anything like that, but I thought it would be very convenient for the production staff to have such detailed, specific information for their deeper comprehension of the setting. In other words, I thought it was pretty meaningful to let all the staff share common knowledge about Gaea, a totally strange place that nobody has ever visited. And because I did not want the setting to be too confined by our sophisticated sense of reality, I deliberately included extremely fantasized elements to differentiate the story from real life. For example, the major two reasons to have beast-men in the series are: first, to make it visually easier for the audience to tell the difference between the two worlds, and second, to make it easier for the audience to notice that Escaflowne is fiction by showing such typical anime fantasy characters.