released 18 sep 05 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* When I saw good reviews for the anime series FULL METAL ALCHEMIST (FMA), I was a bit suspicious. I'd seen good reviews for bad anime series before, and nothing in the promotional material on FMA seemed all that promising.
I went ahead and gave the first volume a shot, and at first it didn't seem very impressive, stylistically and conceptually not all that far off the old mediocre (eventually fading out to trash) SLAYERS anime series. FMA features powerful, egotistical magical alchemist Eduard Elric, who blows his stack when people mock him for his short stature; contrast this to SLAYERS, which features powerful, egotistical sorceress Lina Inverse, who blows her stack when people mock her for being flat-chested.
FMA was watchable, however, so I kept on watching. FMA takes place in a fantasy land that looks something like a military dictatorship in a 1940s Germanic / Slavic state, with soldiers in long coats and jackboots, a Fuerher (an engaging and unpretentious sort), telephones, steam locomotives, touring cars, radios, automatic weapons -- and the ability to transform matter through advanced alchemical magic. Eduard Elric and his little brother Alphonse have been abandoned by their alchemist father and then are confronted by the death of their mother. Edward decides to try to revive their mother, despite the fact that attempting to raise the dead is absolutely forbidden, and enlists Alphonse in the exercise.
Everything goes disastrously wrong, with Eduard losing an arm and leg, and only managing to save Alphonse by transferring his soul to a suit of armor. Eduard is refitted with metallic "automail" limbs, and manages to attract the attention of Lieutenant Colonel Roy Mustang, a "state alchemist" who is impressed that the two lads managed to even survive an attempt to raise the dead. Eduard decides to enlist to become a state alchemist, a "dog of the military", himself, in hopes of finding the legendary "philosopher's stone" that will allow him to undo the mistake he has made.
As the episodes move along, FMA continues to seem something like SLAYERS with different characters and props -- but then it suddenly turns around and smashes the watcher right in the face. It becomes obvious that while FMA does taste like SLAYERS -- with competent but unexciting production values and running slapstick comedy themes -- FMA has something that is very rare in anime series: tight scriptwriting. It has interesting characters, rendered in depth; real plotwork; and real intrigues that actually go someplace, instead of spinning their wheels as so often happens in anime series.
Unfortunately, the series fails to maintain its momentum to the end, bogging down in contrivances as it attempts to tie up loose ends -- the manga series it was based on remained ongoing and so the anime production had to figure out some way of bringing it to a close. Still, overall the production is creditable.
Incidentally, I got to poking though my Japanese dictionaries to figure out the exact translation of the title. The Japanese title was in "funny" fonts that were hard to decipher, but I managed to render it down to "Hagane No Renkinjits'shi", which actually translates as "Steel Alchemist". I prefer the Japanese title.
