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Anime Editorials Reviews

Feast or Filler? Full Metal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos

New anime movies rarely come to southern California (they tend to go instead to Viz’s theater in San Francisco) so I jumped at the chance to see the Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood movie at the Burbank Film Festival.  The movie, titled The Sacred Star of Milos, is the first Full Metal Alchemist movie set in the Brotherhood timeline.  Unlike the original FMA movie, this one is set during, rather than after, the end of the show.  While the producers managed to make a movie with an engaging plot and big budget visuals, they missed the chance to explore new themes.

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Anime Reviews

Special Edition

I’m a perfectionist.  Being a perfectionist isn’t about being perfect, it’s about being unhappy with your work when it isn’t.  Sometimes you have to ignore that impulse and just release your creation to the world.  Sometimes though, you get a second chance.  George Lucas epitomises this phenomena.  Audiences didn’t appreciate it when Lucas revised Star Wars.  Long time fans lashed out at him when he released the special edition movies.  Japanese fans of Dragon Ball Z had a similar reaction when the special edition version of the show, called Dragon Ball Z Kai came out.  I haven’t watched the Japanese subtitled version of the shows so I can’t judge that version of Kai.  But I did watch the English dub.  And it is the best Dragon Ball Z to date.

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Anime Editorials

How to watch your anime

When I watch a new show on TV in the United States I watch each show as it is released, one episode a week.  Until recently I watched anime in a very different way, I would watch anime after all the episodes were released, usually four or five episodes at each sitting.   This led to different viewing experience compared to US shows, albeit one that I did not choose.  But marathoning anime is not the only choice anymore.  With streaming anime, available hours after the Japanese broadcast, I can now watch Japanese shows in the same way I watch American ones.  Now I have to choose which is better, marathoning a show or taking my time to watch one episode each week.
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Anime Reviews

The snowy nights and racing trains of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

Scar and Kimbley face off

Choosing the best anime of 2009 is no contest for me, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood wins it hands down every time, but we’re past any stabs I could make at being objective about this, the show has everything I look for in anime, yet still manages to keep getting better, so much so that earlier today I even started comparing it to Legend of the Galactic Heroes! I mean, what the hell?! All this was again brought to the surface by episodes 32 and 33.
Firstly there is the unending expansion of mangaka Hiromu Arakawa‘s story into newer countries and climates. She achieves the sheer sense of distance usually exclusive to great fantasy, of creating a living, breathing world, which is why I’m now comparing it to Legend of the Galactic Heroes, because even though it’s now over half way through, FMA continues to introduce exciting new characters into the mix.

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Anime Reviews

Fullmetal Alchemist is overlooked as horror


Something that ‘outsiders’ probably don’t realise about Fullmetal Alchemist is just how grotesque and disturbing it can be for mainstream shonen; it has never been a story that shys away from death, even when the victims are cute little girls and their pet dogs!
This lurched back into focus during episode 20 of Brotherhood, when Ed, in-between bouts of throwing up, exhumes the remains of what was supposed to be his half-transmuted mother. While the act of digging up a long-buried grave is, in itself, a stomach-turning thing to do, after Ed looks at the remains, a plot twist even more disturbing is revealed, that the body they pulled back from ‘the other side’ wasn’t their mother’s at all!
Who’s body was it? And why did it appear in place of his mother’s? The story continues to raise these dark questions, and with no comforting, morally-sound answer in sight, I really think that FMA is overlooked as horror. Scenes like these, as well as the twisted fate of characters like Martel, are as cruel and disturbing as anything I’ve seen in anime.

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Editorials Reviews

A love letter to FMA: Brotherhood #19 and why I love anime

Lust's final curtain

I still read my fair share of blogs and forums, so I had something of an inkling that this episode of Brotherhood was going to be quite special, but even still, I loved it to pieces, and once the credits were finally rolling, all I could think is that this was the exact moment that Brotherhood finally stepped out from its predecessor’s shadow and became great anime in it’s own right.
Ah, it’s been a long road. Between the die-hard fans of the manga and lovers of the first series, Brotherhood was always going to face a long and hard battle to win over new admirers, but now there is absolutely no excuse to not be watching this series. I won’t accept it. Episode 19 was perfect.

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Anime Editorials

So, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is bad because it isn't a perfect adaptation of the manga?

I’m really enjoying Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. I haven’t read the manga, but I loved the first anime, even when it diverged from the source material, so I’m not someone that demands an adaptation be a frame-for-frame duplicate, it just has to be good!
Anime is a totally different medium of entertainment to manga and as such, the dream of a ‘perfect adaptation’ is impossible to realise, because what works in a comic won’t always work for animation. The transition between the two effects everything, from the way the dialogue flows to the selection of a certain scene at the expense of another; an anime series will always have a limited number of episodes to fill and when the source material is particularly long-running, not every single panel can be included. This is a limitation of anime and one should approach an adaptation with that in mind.