It only took three years, but heehaw_tng and I finally watched the Fullmetal Alchemist movie. He bought it for my birthday, but wanted me to wait until he had watched the entire series. Well, that day arrived last week. I guess you can't blame him; the second half of the series has some truly dreadful moments and a lot of angst, and the manga is 1,000,000x better.

Now onto Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood! Ahem. This should be fun.


I was thinking about this post of pseudohistorian's, talking about when movies share continuity with the series that spawned them... or when they don't. Of course, anime has movies based on series all the time, but rather than simply divide them into canon and not-canon, there seem to be four distinct categories:

Alternate Universe

TV + Movie 1 + Movie 2

Geez. I had to type it out to make sense of it.

Moving on to in-continuity approaches, I'm not a big fan of Type C, even though it's the most common. Partly because many times, I don't know where to place these movies (though some make it easier than others) but mostly because no matter how big and grand and crazy the threat in the movie is, you can be assured it will have no bearing on the quest in the main series. Powerful weapons? Those will be gone by the end of the film. A villain unlike any they have ever faced? They won't be talking about them come Monday morning. All those companions they loved and lost during the film? Same.

The reasons for this is varied; they don't want people's inability to get to a theater to affect their ability to watch the show, especially given that some of these shows run 52 weeks a year, so there's no chance of waiting for the DVD during the summer break.

It's tempting to place the first Cardcaptor Sakura movie in Type C, but despite diverging from the main premise of "capture all the Clow Cards" (premise-divergence is key to Type C films) the movie cleanly fits into the show's timeline (it's conveniently set over their school break) and is obliquely referenced in the show (Sakura captures the Arrow Card at the start of the film, which soon appears on the show). I also feel like the first movie foreshadows the second film, and the second movie is definitely Type D because its entire purpose is to wrap up the one remaining plot thread from the television show.

(Hmm, they should make an animated Avatar film just to tie up *that* series' one dangling plot thread.)

After all that, I finally get to Fullmetal Alchemist. It had a nice, satisfying ending that was perfectly fine and would have stood as one of the better endings among the anime I've seen (especially among the shows running more than 26 episodes), but I guess they felt it was open enough and there were enough loose threads that a movie was needed (plus, it prints money).

The movie was pretty, and it was neat to watch Edward in not-quite-Nazi Germany, but it didn't really make a whole lot of sense, and the final battle made me want to bang my head against the coffee table with its "WAAARRGGHHH beware my goo-covered ship and the scary alchemy powers that I have mastered five seconds ago!" At the end heehaw_tng and I turned to each other, said "What the shit was that?" Then we went and downloaded Fullmetal Hell.