Two reasons to watch the Fullmetal Alchemist movie

For a start, I really want to know why there's a cat inside Alphonse. Now, I admit I know the series mostly by reputation (I've only seen about five episodes of the original and none of the supposedly superior Brotherhood) so there may be some context here but just for my part that is an arrestingly bizarre and fascinating visual.

Also, there's just the sheer twisted joy that we're finally getting a live action anime adaptation with Japanese actors and its a story set in a fantasy version of Germany (I think) in the industrial revolution. Anime adaptation set in Japan about Japanese characters? Scarlet Johannson. Anime adaptation set in 1900s Europe? All the Japanese actors ever.

No, but seriously though, this is actually a trend in Hollywood I find utterly baffling. Japan has a longstanding hunger for US media and the Chinese market is increasingly all-important for the major studios and yet somehow capitalism hasn't cracked that employing more Asian actors in Asian roles might be a good selling point?

Bizarre. 

Anime: the old subs or dubs debate

It came up the other day that on the rare occasions I watch anime I tend to watch the Japanese dub with subtitles. Some people I didn't know thought this was pretentious on my part. There were a lot of people there and the conversation moved on so I'm just going to put my defence here and be done with it.

You see, it really isn't just me being pretentious. What it is, is me finding the Godawful, am-dram wannabes most US channels employ to record dubs painful to listen to. Over... oh, it must be nearly as decade of on-off dipping into various anime I can name offhand four series with good English dubs.

(Soul Eater, Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and Full Metal Alchemist, in case you were wondering.)

I understand why dubs tend to be bad: imported TV is cheap TV that exists so the broadcaster doesn't have to spend too much making it so you're unlikely to get the sort of voice-acting that graces the likes of Korra or Archer. That's perfectly understandable but it doesn't make it any more pleasant to listen to. Especially if the character is a blonde woman because for some reason blondeness is too often represented by these voice actors by raising the voice several octaves higher than any living human woman actually speaks.

But, seriously though, the US voice cast for Soul Eater is spectacular. 

Fairy Tail, my new slightly guilty pleasure

Anime has never been a big fandom for me. I've watched, even enjoyed, my fair share (Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, the Studio Gibli films) but by and large as an art form it passes me by. I blame Studio Gibli, to be honest, once you've seen Spirited Away there's really nowhere to go but down, is there?

Anyway, Fairy Tail and why I think of it as a bit of a guilty pleasure. You see, I'm as guilty as any non-fan of mocking long-form anime's tropes: fanservice episodes, filler, overblown magic attacks hyper-competent child protagonists... well, the whole series structure of Naruto, basically.

Yes, Naruto, which isn't as bad as a lot of non-fans make it sound but does have systemic flaws. Most of these can be put down to it being a long-form anime based on a long-form manga that's still running. Filler arcs, flashbacks and over-extended fight scenes are a necessary evil to stop the anime overtaking the manga. It makes the pacing of the series brutal, though.

Yet here I am about to extol the virtues of a series that, on the surface, is rather similar. Fairy Tail is about a guild of wizards who take jobs from the civilian population, usually combat-oriented, for money. This structure is basically indistinguishable from Naruto's Leaf Village set-up. The core cast are three young wizards from the guild: Natsu, Lucy and Gray. Natsu and Gray have a passive-aggressive rivalry that turns just aggressive-aggressive at random intervals (see also Naruto and Sasuki) and Lucy is the outwardly least mature, least competent character who muddles her way to success (either early Naruto or Sakura, depending on your reading of the character).

Where things differ is that Fairy Tail takes a very Carry On approach to its characters' roles.

The Carry On films, if you've not heard of them, were a series of film parodies that ran from the 1950s to the 1970s. Each one takes a known genre, populates it with all the expected characters but plays them all for laughs. I saw one over Christmas that was a parody of a Foreign Legion movie and had Kenneth Williams as the Camp Commandant (I know, not too obvious) and he played the part with a ridiculous German accent except in private the character spoke with Williams' normal voice because the character was an Englishman putting on a stereotypical German accent because that's what a Foreign Legion Commandant is “meant” to sound like. Having a strict German officer in charge of a Foreign Legion outpost isn't even a joke, it's a trope and that's where the gag comes from.

So we have Lucy, our blonde, busty, over-sexualised heroine who is also a powerful wizard of the summoner type except whenever she tries to get her way through flirting or flashing her cleavage it turns out the other character just doesn't fancy her. We have Natsu, who is constantly bigged up as the most powerful fire mage anyone who fights him has ever seen except that he keeps being floored by horrendous motion sickness. We have Gray, the attractive young man you'd expect to get shirtless every now and again for fanservice but who doesn't need any contrived plot reason to do so, he just continuously and randomly strips as a running gag. Literally, the shot will leave him for a moment then turn back to him in his boxers or less for no explained reason.

Then there's the Fairy Tail Guild itself, which is based out of a pub and whose members have a reputation for collateral damage above and beyond the call of duty, drunken behaviour and general rowdiness. One character, Mirajane, is apparently a powerful and famous mage but instead of the sort of epochal destiny you'd expect such a character to have her ambitions don't seem to run to more than running the bar and doing a bit of glamour modelling on the side.

The resulting series is fun and utterly charming. I doubt I'll sit through the full 170+ episodes but its a better than decent way to waste twenty minutes between bits of housework.

(This post is indebted to Philip Sandifer and his scientific breakdown ofhow Carry On films work from his TARDIS Eruditorum series).