Details & Synopsis
The year is 1910, approximately. The country is Amestris, approximately. Two boys in a rural town teach themselves alchemy from their absent father's books and decide to do the one thing every alchemical text agrees cannot be done, human transmutation, the resurrection of the dead. Their mother. They are children. They do not survive the attempt intact.
Edward Elric loses his right arm and left leg. Alphonse Elric loses everything, his entire body, seized by the Gate, leaving behind only a soul that Ed binds to a suit of armour in the seconds before he loses consciousness. The exchange is the series' foundation and its recurring nightmare: the law of equivalent exchange, the principle that underpins all alchemy, applied to the thing it was never meant to touch. They paid. They did not get what they paid for.
Produced by Bones and directed by Seiji Mizushima, Fullmetal Alchemist aired on MBS from 2003 to 2004. Fifty-one episodes. It began adapting Hiromu Arakawa's manga faithfully and then, as the weekly production overtook the still-running manga, gradually moved into an original storyline. What followed is one of the most remarkable pivots in anime history: the production team, with Arakawa's blessing and a handful of her discarded plot threads, invented their own story. Their own villain. Their own ending.
The ending they arrived at is darker than Brotherhood's. More ambiguous. More interested in the cost of the boys' choices than in the resolution of the world's politics. Dante. The Gate. What is on the other side of it. A finale that refuses the comfort of restoration and insists that some debts cannot be paid back, they can only be carried forward.
Brotherhood is the manga. Faithful, complete, structurally confident, the story Arakawa intended. This is something else. A parallel history. A what-if that the people who made it took entirely seriously. Both versions are essential. They are not the same show wearing the same premise. They are two writers asking the same question and arriving at different answers about what human beings owe each other and what alchemy, the science of transformation, of making one thing into another, actually costs when the thing being transformed is a person.
Watch both. Then argue about which one broke you worse.
Edward Elric loses his right arm and left leg. Alphonse Elric loses everything, his entire body, seized by the Gate, leaving behind only a soul that Ed binds to a suit of armour in the seconds before he loses consciousness. The exchange is the series' foundation and its recurring nightmare: the law of equivalent exchange, the principle that underpins all alchemy, applied to the thing it was never meant to touch. They paid. They did not get what they paid for.
Produced by Bones and directed by Seiji Mizushima, Fullmetal Alchemist aired on MBS from 2003 to 2004. Fifty-one episodes. It began adapting Hiromu Arakawa's manga faithfully and then, as the weekly production overtook the still-running manga, gradually moved into an original storyline. What followed is one of the most remarkable pivots in anime history: the production team, with Arakawa's blessing and a handful of her discarded plot threads, invented their own story. Their own villain. Their own ending.
The ending they arrived at is darker than Brotherhood's. More ambiguous. More interested in the cost of the boys' choices than in the resolution of the world's politics. Dante. The Gate. What is on the other side of it. A finale that refuses the comfort of restoration and insists that some debts cannot be paid back, they can only be carried forward.
Brotherhood is the manga. Faithful, complete, structurally confident, the story Arakawa intended. This is something else. A parallel history. A what-if that the people who made it took entirely seriously. Both versions are essential. They are not the same show wearing the same premise. They are two writers asking the same question and arriving at different answers about what human beings owe each other and what alchemy, the science of transformation, of making one thing into another, actually costs when the thing being transformed is a person.
Watch both. Then argue about which one broke you worse.
Alt Title
鋼の錬金術師
Studio
Bones
Network
MBS
Aired
2003 - 2004
Episodes
51
Genre
Action, Adventure, Drama
Status
Completed
Guides and reference pages for this series. More coming.
