Fullmetal Alchemist: The Movie 5/10

All the hype comes to a head with the big budget movie to finish the FMA story and with the big jack comes big expectations. Better luck next time guys.

The FMA movie was released in July of 2005 and runs about 100 minutes or so. As with all theatrical anime the frame rate increases and overall animation quality goes up compared to the TV series. Thankfully the character designs remain roughly the same, this is a crime MANY anime movies based on an existing series are guilty of (I'm looking at you Inu Yasha). The music isn't anything better than the TV series which is OK and all the VAs are the same so that's all good too. The one technical problem I found annoying was the overall brownness of the whole thing. The movie felt darker and dirtier than the TV series, after watching a TV series filled with blue skies and green trees I kind of missed them.

The plot of the movie picks up 2 years after the end of the TV series and Al is now traveling around in Ed's red jacket doing various alchemy type things. Ed on the other hand is trapped in pre-WWII London and is helping a young man who looks like Al to develop rockets since he has no alchemy in the "real" world.

Things move along ridiculously fast as the others trapped in the "real" world (Envy and Ed's father) are quickly dispatched in order to open a gate to the usual FMA world and the "real" world's Al plans to give his rockets to some Nazis to make the trip through the new gate.

A bunch of convenient gate trips result in a big battle in the FMA world between a bunch of armoured Nazi's and the State Alchemists and the whole thing ends pretty abruptly with an overall crappy ending.

I won't spoil the ending but I didn't like it and I really felt the humour from the series was sorely missed. Add to that the poorly thought out premise behind the movie and I can't give this a really good grade. I didn't hate it but.... Of course if you've watched the TV series by all means watch the movie, just don't expect much.