Half-Masked

Saw the first episode of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. I think they’re plowing through too many of the gags too soon. The original series was slow, but I admired its patience. It took its time. It built up to those gags and those revelations so that they payed off after the wait. So that they actually mattered. It stopped to smell the roses.

This one episode managed to trot out:

• -Armstrong
• -Roy’s friend being obsessively doting upon his daughter
• -Revealing the Fuhrer is not everything he seems

And all the while giving absolutely no explanation for how or why anything happens. It just immediately jumps into a big anime action sequence-heavy episode without setting anything up. What a weird way to start things off.

I think the people behind this version of the show really do care about the source material. They just couldn’t wait to get to the parts they remember and love. Unfortunately, this lack of patience creates a very strange and cluttered first episode, one that asks a little too much of the viewer to take in all at once.

That’s not to say it’s -bad-, by any means. The production values are fantastic as always, and it does seem to have a good enough handle on these characters. They just picked the wrong place to kick things off. It relies too much on its audience knowing all of the cards before they’re dealt. To those unfamiliar with either the previous show or the manga, it is maddening. To those of us who do know these characters and situations, it’s not telling us anything we don’t already know. I hope this isn’t a sign of how the rest of the series will play out. I hope this is just a hiccup.

Whether I continue watching it depends entirely on if it is dubbed, and if Vic Mignogna reprises that role. It just isn’t the same without him.

END OF LINE

~A.H.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 8:13 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.