December 24, 2004
Fantastic Children Episode 7 - Befort's Children
Cooks and Hollingworth travel to Clairmont and listen to Cooks' recording of the diary of a scientist named Radcliffe. Cooks' grandfather witnessed the death of Befort's Children in 1901, discovering a strange black stone at the scene. On handing this to Radcliffe, he begins to investigate it with the aid of X-rays (which of course one of the Children discovered!) and discovers numerous indecipherable, constantly shifting inscriptions inside. The GED Project was then set up to investigate the stone, but Radcliffe eventually discovers that the British government was already aware of Befort's Children and so journeys around Europe chasing their pasts. We discover that the children are named after a small village in Belgium, where the earliest record of their existence (1489) was found. However, Radcliffe was driven mad by his obsession with the Children and eventually was discredited and died.
Meanwhile the Children are already regrouping at Clairmont, where Hasmodai is once more entrapped by his past memories of family - however, Agi "saves" him by returning his memory recording. The other Children are not best pleased with him, yet Hasmodai still leans towards giving up their quest...
I thought that the whole memory trapping thing had something to do with the shadowy creatures chasing the Children, but obviously that's different from what happened here. The Children themselves are far more interesting than Thoma/Helga/Chit at the moment, so this episode was especially good (although we didn't really learn a lot more than we knew already) - I hope that the main present-day storyline becomes just as interesting eventually.
There was one visual effect in this episode in particular that really stood out for me - after Agi returns the memory crystal to Hasmodai and he sees his home town once more, the whole background flows back into his sword capsule thing, which I thought was a particularly clever piece of animation - given how "old school" Fantastic Children is, it really does use modern technology in very unobtrusive ways.
Posted by BluWacky at December 24, 2004 01:58 PM | TrackBack