[REVIEW] Fullmetal Alchemist
Sep. 24th, 2007 11:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldFor a few months earlier this year, I watched the anime Fullmetal Alchemist with a group of friends. Overall, I was quite impressed by the anime--I even liked the J-rock season themes. What most impressed me abnout the anime was its rapid yet seamless evolution from a kids' adventure serial to a much darker and profoundly compelling epic.
Fullmetal Alchemist's protagonists are Edward and Alphonse Elric, young brothers who grew up in the nation of Amestris, located in a sort of alternate-historical Europe that possesses a broadly early 20th century technology complicated by the fact that the alchemy that on our world is a pseudoscience, is here a highly-refined working science. Alchemical prodigies from a young age, the Elric brothers are transformed after a horribly failed attempt to use alchemy to bring their mother back from the dead, the older Edward losing an arm and a leg in an alchemical ritual that prevents Edward's soul from being wholly absorbed by the Gate of Alchemy by bonding it to a convenient suit of armour. As the Elric brothers travel about Amestris, they discover to their horror that their country was founded by a pair of immortality-seeking alchemists fond of using mass human sacrifice in order to ensure their power, committing a series of atrocities as various as the burial of Amestris' original capital centuries ago to the contemporary genocide of the Ishbalans by the Amestris state, which appears to be a local variant on Europe's totalitarian state, complete with a Führer who--incidentally--is an alchemical monstrosity controlled by one of Amestris' founding alchemists. (The other founding alchemist turns out to be the Elric brothers' long-lost father, while it turns out that the brothers' attempted resurrection of their mother created another alchemical monster. Yes, these and other traumas surely reverberate.)
The series ends when, after discovering and obliterating this conspiracy, Alphonse ends up travelling to our Earth as a by-product of his restoratyion of Edward to his own body. The action now switches to the Germany of the 1920s, the viewer learning in the final episode that the Elric brothers' now-regretful father is associated with the Thule Society. The follow-up movie, Conqueror of Shamballa, explores the Nazi reaction to Amestris at length, even including geopolitician and Thule Society Karl Haushofer as a character.
Fullmetal Alchemist is a gripping fantasy epic in its own right, but it's worth noting as one of the major explorations of Naziism in contemporary popular culture. It's a world where the occult imaginings of Naziism so chillingly conveyed in Heather Pringle's The Master Plan--the search for occult items, the belief in the mystic origins of the Aryans and the existence of malign racial conspiracies, the reduction of human history to one of manichaean struggles of good versus evil and the willingness to do whatever it takes to restore balance to the world--are entirely real facts of life. Observers like Adam Tooze have noted that the policies of the Nazi German state seem to have been motivated by an incomprehensible willed irrationality. Writers like Preston, and pop-cultural works like Fullmetal Alchemist, give the consumer and idea as to how the Nazis thought the world actually worked.
Fullmetal Alchemist's protagonists are Edward and Alphonse Elric, young brothers who grew up in the nation of Amestris, located in a sort of alternate-historical Europe that possesses a broadly early 20th century technology complicated by the fact that the alchemy that on our world is a pseudoscience, is here a highly-refined working science. Alchemical prodigies from a young age, the Elric brothers are transformed after a horribly failed attempt to use alchemy to bring their mother back from the dead, the older Edward losing an arm and a leg in an alchemical ritual that prevents Edward's soul from being wholly absorbed by the Gate of Alchemy by bonding it to a convenient suit of armour. As the Elric brothers travel about Amestris, they discover to their horror that their country was founded by a pair of immortality-seeking alchemists fond of using mass human sacrifice in order to ensure their power, committing a series of atrocities as various as the burial of Amestris' original capital centuries ago to the contemporary genocide of the Ishbalans by the Amestris state, which appears to be a local variant on Europe's totalitarian state, complete with a Führer who--incidentally--is an alchemical monstrosity controlled by one of Amestris' founding alchemists. (The other founding alchemist turns out to be the Elric brothers' long-lost father, while it turns out that the brothers' attempted resurrection of their mother created another alchemical monster. Yes, these and other traumas surely reverberate.)
The series ends when, after discovering and obliterating this conspiracy, Alphonse ends up travelling to our Earth as a by-product of his restoratyion of Edward to his own body. The action now switches to the Germany of the 1920s, the viewer learning in the final episode that the Elric brothers' now-regretful father is associated with the Thule Society. The follow-up movie, Conqueror of Shamballa, explores the Nazi reaction to Amestris at length, even including geopolitician and Thule Society Karl Haushofer as a character.
Fullmetal Alchemist is a gripping fantasy epic in its own right, but it's worth noting as one of the major explorations of Naziism in contemporary popular culture. It's a world where the occult imaginings of Naziism so chillingly conveyed in Heather Pringle's The Master Plan--the search for occult items, the belief in the mystic origins of the Aryans and the existence of malign racial conspiracies, the reduction of human history to one of manichaean struggles of good versus evil and the willingness to do whatever it takes to restore balance to the world--are entirely real facts of life. Observers like Adam Tooze have noted that the policies of the Nazi German state seem to have been motivated by an incomprehensible willed irrationality. Writers like Preston, and pop-cultural works like Fullmetal Alchemist, give the consumer and idea as to how the Nazis thought the world actually worked.
