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Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 2003
Forty years since Mighty Atom appeared on TV in Japan (which I have had to keep considering corresponds to Astro Boy appearing on TV in America) is still twenty years back from today, and if there remains something to the suggestions that drift around that the great majority of the anime-viewing audience keeps turning over within a few years I should still be dealing with titles that are older than those people. (The suggestions have to at least be weighed against all the mutterings how “nowadays anime is made for a handful of creeps who’ve stuck with it for too long...”) The series from twenty years ago I’ve returned to the opening of was popular in its time and endured afterwards, but the endurance of the original anime adaptation of Hiromu Arakawa’s Fullmetal Alchemist manga just might have been a matter of getting tangled up with controversy.
I first managed to watch the Fullmetal Alchemist anime dubbed on TV (for of all the complaints about not having anything as good as Cartoon Network when it came to anime being popularized on TV in my country, we weren’t altogether deprived). After that I bought up the DVDs, and also started buying the original manga. At the very moment when all the comments about the anime having diverged from the still-ongoing original story for the sake of coming to a conclusion were starting to be backed up by the latest manga volumes in translation, though, the latest scandal over artwork being retouched out of some apparent compulsion to avoid any possibility of parents somewhere taking offense claimed Viz’s release of Fullmetal Alchemist. I stopped buying manga from the company altogether in a fit of pique. For a while, my usual strategy of “using manga from Del Rey, which had promised to not retouch the interior art after being called out on plans to do that when just starting out, as a substitute for titles from all the other manga publishers” had me buying a series called Pumpkin Scissors just because I’d seen broad parallels drawn between its “an eccentric military unit handles crises in a ‘post-steampunk’ world” story and Fullmetal Alchemist’s. That only lasted until Del Rey started discontinuing series amid a general downturn in the manga market over here, though, and when Kodansha took over some of its titles Pumpkin Scissors wasn’t included. I suppose all of this might have scotched any concern I ever had of coming to agree with what seemed certain insinuations manga, in offering art and stories undiluted by the need for animation production and broadcast standards, would eventually displace anime in the affections of just about anyone. For that matter too Kodansha did eventually conclude one Del Rey title I’d been left hanging on through digital release; I haven’t yet got around to looking up if that also happened with Pumpkin Scissors, though.
After all of that, news of another anime adaptation of Fullmetal Alchemist that would go all the way through the manga did get my attention. That second adaptation (usually called “Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood” just as the original was now being tagged with “2003”), though, took a lot of lumps early on for racing through the material that had been adapted before. I was still inclined to the sullen thought “it’s the only way I can see how the original story ended,” but then I heard rumours a new omnibus reprint of the manga had changed the fatal panels back to the way they’d been in Japan. I took a chance on it, and then I just happened to go ahead and get a fancier complete box set of the original manga volumes, the reprints of which were also no longer affected.
The original anime adaptation continued to be praised, if with an edge of putting the second adaptation down that never quite settled well with me. I did go to the point of buying a Blu-Ray re-release of that earlier series, and from a store in the nearest mall to boot. That re-release wasn’t available for long, though, and I’m afraid I did go from wondering if “Funimation was making a last desperate attempt to prove to Aniplex of America it was possible to make a profit on cheap releases aimed at a wider market” to wondering if “Funimation had vengefully poisoned the well against Aniplex releasing another pricy, claimed-to-be-high-quality set after reclaiming its old licenses.” (This series hasn’t had a re-release like that, anyway.)
At last I was intent on at least starting into those Blu-Rays; remembering the initial adventure that had set up the Elric brothers and their quest to restore part of what they’d lost through a foolhardy experiment in alchemical transmutation had been stretched out a bit, I watched two episodes. The picture did look decent for not quite seeming to be in the era of high-definition production yet, but I did keep musing on my best understanding of a fundamental difference between this original adaptation and the original manga (and by extension the later adaptation). The original anime seems to end up in a rather sombre mood; the other versions of the story seem to end up with more slam-bang action. There are some interesting ideas developed in the original anime even if some memorable characters show up later on in the other stories, and yet, along with certain quibbles on recalling some things being stretched out early in the original anime, I suppose my reactions might get summed up in “The Empire Strikes Back isn’t the be-all and end-all of Star Wars for me.” I at least wondered, watching just these first two episodes of the original anime, if their expansion on the original manga (which I went to the point of going back to check afterwards) could get to feeling slightly diluted and already that much more sombre.
I first managed to watch the Fullmetal Alchemist anime dubbed on TV (for of all the complaints about not having anything as good as Cartoon Network when it came to anime being popularized on TV in my country, we weren’t altogether deprived). After that I bought up the DVDs, and also started buying the original manga. At the very moment when all the comments about the anime having diverged from the still-ongoing original story for the sake of coming to a conclusion were starting to be backed up by the latest manga volumes in translation, though, the latest scandal over artwork being retouched out of some apparent compulsion to avoid any possibility of parents somewhere taking offense claimed Viz’s release of Fullmetal Alchemist. I stopped buying manga from the company altogether in a fit of pique. For a while, my usual strategy of “using manga from Del Rey, which had promised to not retouch the interior art after being called out on plans to do that when just starting out, as a substitute for titles from all the other manga publishers” had me buying a series called Pumpkin Scissors just because I’d seen broad parallels drawn between its “an eccentric military unit handles crises in a ‘post-steampunk’ world” story and Fullmetal Alchemist’s. That only lasted until Del Rey started discontinuing series amid a general downturn in the manga market over here, though, and when Kodansha took over some of its titles Pumpkin Scissors wasn’t included. I suppose all of this might have scotched any concern I ever had of coming to agree with what seemed certain insinuations manga, in offering art and stories undiluted by the need for animation production and broadcast standards, would eventually displace anime in the affections of just about anyone. For that matter too Kodansha did eventually conclude one Del Rey title I’d been left hanging on through digital release; I haven’t yet got around to looking up if that also happened with Pumpkin Scissors, though.
After all of that, news of another anime adaptation of Fullmetal Alchemist that would go all the way through the manga did get my attention. That second adaptation (usually called “Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood” just as the original was now being tagged with “2003”), though, took a lot of lumps early on for racing through the material that had been adapted before. I was still inclined to the sullen thought “it’s the only way I can see how the original story ended,” but then I heard rumours a new omnibus reprint of the manga had changed the fatal panels back to the way they’d been in Japan. I took a chance on it, and then I just happened to go ahead and get a fancier complete box set of the original manga volumes, the reprints of which were also no longer affected.
The original anime adaptation continued to be praised, if with an edge of putting the second adaptation down that never quite settled well with me. I did go to the point of buying a Blu-Ray re-release of that earlier series, and from a store in the nearest mall to boot. That re-release wasn’t available for long, though, and I’m afraid I did go from wondering if “Funimation was making a last desperate attempt to prove to Aniplex of America it was possible to make a profit on cheap releases aimed at a wider market” to wondering if “Funimation had vengefully poisoned the well against Aniplex releasing another pricy, claimed-to-be-high-quality set after reclaiming its old licenses.” (This series hasn’t had a re-release like that, anyway.)
At last I was intent on at least starting into those Blu-Rays; remembering the initial adventure that had set up the Elric brothers and their quest to restore part of what they’d lost through a foolhardy experiment in alchemical transmutation had been stretched out a bit, I watched two episodes. The picture did look decent for not quite seeming to be in the era of high-definition production yet, but I did keep musing on my best understanding of a fundamental difference between this original adaptation and the original manga (and by extension the later adaptation). The original anime seems to end up in a rather sombre mood; the other versions of the story seem to end up with more slam-bang action. There are some interesting ideas developed in the original anime even if some memorable characters show up later on in the other stories, and yet, along with certain quibbles on recalling some things being stretched out early in the original anime, I suppose my reactions might get summed up in “The Empire Strikes Back isn’t the be-all and end-all of Star Wars for me.” I at least wondered, watching just these first two episodes of the original anime, if their expansion on the original manga (which I went to the point of going back to check afterwards) could get to feeling slightly diluted and already that much more sombre.