鋼の錬金術師 / Hagane no Renkinjutsushi / Fullmetal Alchemist (Original series)

Hagane no Renkinjutsushi is one of those iconic anime that dominates the community for a while. It made a big impact as a manga, gained a large fanbase when its anime begun airing and reached its peak once it was licensed and (very badly) dubbed.

Like Shugo Chara, it’s an anime based on a monthly manga that ends up taking the ideas and characters of the manga and rewrites the story (unlike, say, Naruto or One Piece, which are mostly direct translations from page to screen, with throwaway ‘filler’ to waste time if material runs out). Also like Shugo Chara, it’s one of the rare series I feel works as a companion piece to a very different manga as an alternate timeline, rather than as a replacement.

Besides, since then, a new animated series has been made, going back to the manga faithfully.

The story is complex and very well constructed save for a few small issues. Two boys, the Elric Brothers, live in a world where alchemy exists – the ability to transmute one material into another, as long as there is ‘equivalent trade’: all the right materials in place to be rearranged. Something cannot be created from nothing. One day, these boys attempt to bring their mother back from the dead, using all the raw materials used in a human body – but they do not take into account the additional element of human life, and the alchemical reaction claims not only all the materials they provided, but one of Edward Elric’s legs and his little brother Alphonse’s entire body.

In something of a trance, little Ed manages to save Al’s soul in exchange for his own arm, but not his body, so the younger brother ends up a real ghost in a machine – or, more specifically, a suit of armour. Two years later, Ed’s arm and leg have been replaced by metal prosthetics, and the brothers get involved with the military in order to further their search for the Philosopher’s Stone, which will grant unlimited power to any alchemist who wields it, and get their bodies back.

Hagaren’s greatest strength is perfectly balancing the serious (with moving deaths, some shocking psychological traumas and issues of racial prejudice) and the comic (Ed’s ‘automail’ prosthetics have stunted his growth and given him a complex; Barry the Chopper has a great grasp of bathos; Alex Louis Armstrong the musclebound nobleman is about the funniest character I’ve ever seen). With some incredible action sequences, it is original, intelligent and immensely enjoyable. Though occasionally cheesy and sometimes a bit artificial in its portrayal of how people think, nonetheless it comes very highly recommended, and I genuinely would recommend watching the first series before the remake.

(Expanded from original impressions, 21.2.05. I originally wrote that Mai-HiME was a manga first, which is not true. Movie impressions here)

Manga reviews: Fullmetal Alchemist

On the 27th May 2003, I made my usual daily check of Toriyama’s World. Back then, TW was without doubt the biggest and most important scanslation site on the internet, providing scans of big shounen series like Hikaru no Go and HunterXHunter. They were also not only scanning an up-and-coming series called Naruto but even releasing fansubs of the anime – but back then, I wasn’t too keen on the juvenile-looking series, heheh.

On that day, Toriyama’s World released a chapter of Hikaru no Go, which I was very eager to read, but also announced a new monthly manga called Fullmetal Alchemist. ‘it’s about an alchemist who can do a lot of cool stuff. it's pretty good. you should read it’, went the release, somewhat unconvincingly, adding as an afterthought a little note: ‘you’d better read fma, cuz we may or may not have hidden an integral page of the hng chapter in the fma chapter… tho really, who needs a gimmick to make people read a manga this good!’

Well, if that announcement was hardly auspicious, I downloaded the chapter and loved it. Some great artwork, really appealing characters, a superb setting and the great concept of magic deeply based in science.

It’s now more than seven years later, and Fullmetal Alchemist is huge. From the first episode of the anime, where I was very surprised Al sounded like a little boy, to seeing the movie in Japan on the day of an earthquake, to the new Brotherhood remake growing from redundancy to innovation, Hagaren would seldom be out of my life. It has a huge but fickle fanbase, and even though the manga has been a constant fixture for all these years, when the first anime stopped airing, it was remarkable how many people seemed to give up on their beloved title.

I’ve summarized the series in general as an anime, so I don’t need to go into that here, but it ought to be said that it’s always been the manga I’ve enjoyed the most. The art is unique and often very odd but beautiful to look at, and the pacing is superb – other than in the flashback segment. Few series have so perfectly balanced humour and action, and this series deserves to be a classic. Its concept, characters, world and storyline are all genuinely exemplary.

But the manga rolled on, and I kept reading, through the flabby chapters of flashback and through Arakawa’s other side-projects. And now it’s all finally come to an end with chapter 108, an extended special of over 100 pages. I thought I would rail against it. I thought that it couldn’t possibly end satisfactorily in one more chapter. But I was wrong: the summation of the homunculus storyline was also the climax of all the main characters’ paths and it ended neatly, cleverly and with so many little flashes of where the characters will go next, each one fairly moving.

This is somewhat the end of an era, for me. And I can’t help but feel a little moved!