Where did the idea for Escaflowne come from?
From the fog in Nepal: a hidden world, seen in the mountains, where fate could be read like weather.
On a trip to Nepal, Shoji Kawamori visited a foggy mountain region and pictured a hidden world where an epic about fate and divination should be set. Back in Japan he proposed the series to Bandai Visual and Sunrise with a pitch he later summarized in one line: if Macross was robotic mecha and love songs, why not a story about robotic mecha and divining powers?
Working with Bandai producer Minoru Takanashi, Kawamori researched mysteries for source material, particularly the legends of Atlantis and the Bermuda Triangle, both of which survive in the finished series: Gaea is a world wished into being by Atlantis, and people vanish from Earth into it.
THE DESIGN STUDY UNDERNEATH
Air Cavalry Chronicles空中騎行戦記 · Air Cavalry Chronicles
In the early 1990s Kawamori had run a design project under this title, a more modern, dieselpunk-flavored flying-cavalry concept. Its three fictional countries were named Asturia, Fanelia, and the Zaibach Empire, the exact nations of the finished Escaflowne.
What survived the split
The project eventually divided in two. The story changed genre and became Escaflowne; pieces of the mechanical design work travelled onward into Kawamori's Macross projects, where the LV-7 "Valorous Rapier" fighter has a documented lineage back to the Chronicles designs.
The lead changed
As the concept took shape the hero changed from a boy to a high school girl, and fortune-telling moved from decoration to the engine of the plot: Hitomi's visions drive nearly every turn of the war.