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Fullmetal Alchemist

鋼の錬金術師

2003 –2004 Bones MBS 51 episodes Completed

Action Adventure Drama

The year is 1910, approximately. The country is Amestris, approximately. Two boys in a rural town teach themselves alchemy from their absent father's books and decide to do the one thing every alchemical text agrees cannot be done — human transmutation, the resurrection of the dead. Their mother. They are children. They do not survive the attempt intact.
Edward Elric loses his right arm and left leg. Alphonse Elric loses everything — his entire body, seized by the Gate, leaving behind only a soul that Ed binds to a suit of armour in the seconds before he loses consciousness. The exchange is the series' foundation and its recurring nightmare: the law of equivalent exchange, the principle that underpins all alchemy, applied to the thing it was never meant to touch. They paid. They did not get what they paid for.
Produced by Bones and directed by Seiji Mizushima, Fullmetal Alchemist aired on MBS from 2003 to 2004. Fifty-one episodes. It began adapting Hiromu Arakawa's manga faithfully and then, around episode fifteen, ran out of manga to adapt. What followed is one of the most remarkable pivots in anime history: the production team, with Arakawa's blessing and a handful of her discarded plot threads, invented their own story. Their own villain. Their own ending.
The ending they arrived at is darker than Brotherhood's. More ambiguous. More interested in the cost of the boys' choices than in the resolution of the world's politics. Dante. The Gate. What is on the other side of it. A finale that refuses the comfort of restoration and insists that some debts cannot be paid back — they can only be carried forward.
Brotherhood is the manga. Faithful, complete, structurally confident, the story Arakawa intended. This is something else. A parallel history. A what-if that the people who made it took entirely seriously. Both versions are essential. They are not the same show wearing the same premise. They are two writers asking the same question and arriving at different answers about what human beings owe each other and what alchemy — the science of transformation, of making one thing into another — actually costs when the thing being transformed is a person.
Watch both. Then argue about which one broke you worse.

Edward Elric

Protagonist

State Alchemist at twelve years old. Youngest ever certified. Lost his right arm and left leg performing human transmutation to resurrect his mother and paid his brother's entire body as the toll when the Gate took Al instead. Automail prosthetics, a scarlet coat, and a chip on his shoulder the size of Central Command. The 2003 version of Edward is angrier and more uncertain than most protagonists get to be. He is chasing the Philosopher's Stone to restore Al and the further he gets the less sure he is that the path leads anywhere clean. Do not call him short.

Alphonse Elric

Protagonist

His entire body was the toll. Ed bound his soul to a suit of armor at the last possible second before the Gate took him completely. Seven feet of medieval plate steel with no heartbeat, no sense of touch, no taste, no smell. Gentle past all reasonable explanation given what he has been through. The 2003 anime adds a particular cruelty unique to this version: the question of whether Al's memories of his childhood are real, or whether they were implanted by Ed to give the soul in the armor something to hold onto. Whether the person inside the armor has always been there. The show does not answer this quickly.

Roy Mustang

Supporting

The Flame Alchemist. Colonel. His gloves create a spark through friction and the arrays on them do the rest. Useless in the rain, which the show remembers at the worst possible moments. Ishvalan war veteran who burned people alive on orders and has been climbing toward the Fuhrer's office ever since on the theory that getting there is the only way to make it mean something. Uses the Elrics as pieces in that climb. Genuinely cares about them. Both things are completely true and the show never lets either one cancel the other out.

Winry Rockbell

Supporting

Automail mechanic from Resembool. Built Edward's prosthetic arm and leg and maintains them every time he comes back from wherever the military sent him having broken something. Her parents were doctors who treated both sides during the Ishvalan war. In the 2003 version that fact has a specific and painful shape that the show eventually forces into the open. Winry is the emotional fixed point the brothers keep measuring their distance from. The further they get the more that distance costs.

Riza Hawkeye

Supporting

Mustang's lieutenant and the most reliable person in his orbit by a significant margin. Sharpshooter. Her father Berthold Hawkeye originated flame alchemy and in the 2003 version encoded everything he knew in tattoos across Riza's back before he died, passing the knowledge to Mustang through her. She follows Mustang because she believes in what he is trying to become. She is also the person in the best position to stop him if he becomes something else. The show understands that these two facts are connected.

Maes Hughes

SPOILER!

Supporting

Lieutenant Colonel, Investigation. Will show you a photograph of his daughter Elicia whether you asked or not. One of the warmest presences in a show that is frequently brutal, a genuine friend to Mustang that predates everything else, and the kind of character a series builds carefully so that what it does with him lands with full weight. His arc in the 2003 version hits the same as the manga and Brotherhood because the material is that strong. Do not get too comfortable.

Izumi Curtis

Mentor

The brothers' alchemy teacher. Took them on, threw them onto an island alone for a month with nothing as a training exercise, and hit Ed hard enough to send him through a wall the first time he got smart with her. Also a failed human transmutation. She tried to bring back her stillborn child and lost organs at the Gate that have been slowly killing her ever since. The best alchemist the show introduces who refuses to be a State Alchemist on principle. She thinks the military is rotten. She is not wrong.

Scar

Antagonist

Ishvalan survivor. His people were exterminated by State Alchemists on government orders and he walked out of the massacre with his brother's research tattooed onto his right arm, arrays that deconstruct anything he touches. He hunts State Alchemists. Has specific and complicated feelings about the Elrics specifically. The 2003 version handles his arc with more ambiguity than most revenge narratives allow themselves, refusing to settle him into a clean category of hero or villain. He does not fit and the show does not try to make him fit.

Van Hohenheim

SPOILER!

Supporting

The brothers' father. Left Resembool when Edward and Alphonse were small and did not come back. Turns up in photographs that should not exist given when they were taken. In the 2003 version Hohenheim's nature and history are entirely original to this anime, distinct from the manga and Brotherhood, and central to how the second half of the story works. What he is, what he did, and what he owes are questions the show answers slowly and on its own terms. He is not what he appears to be. Neither is his absence.

Shou Tucker

Supporting

The Sewing-Life Alchemist. Certified his State Alchemist license by creating a chimera capable of human speech. Generous to the Elrics during their time in East City, a seemingly kind and harried single father. His daughter Nina adores him. The show introduces Tucker carefully and spends real time making you comfortable with him. It knows exactly what it is doing. Episode thirteen is one of the most devastating hours in the series and Tucker is the reason. Not a minor character. The show does not allow him to be a minor character.

Lust

SPOILER!

Antagonist

The homunculus who operates as the public face of the group. Poised, precise, her Ultimate Shield ability extends her fingers into hardened lances capable of cutting through almost anything. The 2003 version of Lust is unique in the franchise for how much interiority the show gives her. She questions her own existence with a genuine philosophical weight, wondering what a homunculus actually is and whether the person she was made from had anything to do with who she became. The most human of the homunculi. The show uses that against you.

Envy

SPOILER!

Antagonist

Shape-shifter. Can assume the appearance of any person with precision that makes him the homunculi's most useful infiltration asset and cruelest psychological weapon. Sadistic, theatrical, genuinely enjoys causing pain in a way the other homunculi treat as a job. The 2003 version of Envy has a backstory and a specific relationship to Hohenheim that is entirely original to this anime and reframes everything about him once it lands. The name is not an accident. The hatred underneath it is older than almost anything else in the story.

Gluttony

Antagonist

Eats everything. People, objects, the ground he is standing on. Childlike in affect, simple in motivation, and built like a weapon anyway. Gluttony operates as Lust's shadow for most of the series, attached to her with a devotion that is one of the stranger and more affecting relationships the show produces. He is not complicated. The show does not try to make him complicated. What he is, is enough.

Greed

Antagonist

The rogue homunculus. Broke away from the others and set up his own operation in the underground of Dublith, running a gang of chimera outcasts called the Devil's Nest. Ultimate Shield hardens his skin into a carbon surface that stops almost anything. Wants everything: money, women, power, immortality, freedom. The most upfront about what he is and what he wants, which makes him the easiest of the homunculi to read and paradoxically one of the more interesting ones to watch. His arc in the 2003 version is short and deliberately so.

Wrath

SPOILER!

Antagonist

The youngest. A child, visibly and in behavior, volatile and desperate in the way children are when they have been given no stability. Wrath is unique among the homunculi in this version for reasons the show earns the right to explain on its own schedule. What he is and where he came from is one of the 2003 anime's most original and painful creations, tied directly to Izumi Curtis in a way that recontextualizes her arc entirely. The fury in the name is real and it is not simple.

Sloth

SPOILER!

Antagonist

Appears as a high-ranking military official. Composed, efficient, dangerous. Everything about Sloth in the 2003 version is specific to this anime and none of it is in the manga or Brotherhood. Her true nature is the single most deliberately cruel thing the show does to Edward, a reveal engineered to hit as hard as possible at the exact moment the series chooses to deploy it. The name is a misdirect. What she represents to the Elric brothers is something much harder to look at than laziness.

King Bradley

SPOILER!

Antagonist

Fuhrer of Amestris. Commander in Chief. Decorated veteran, decisive leader, a man who projects absolute authority so naturally that the camera believes him even when the audience starts not to. In the 2003 version Bradley is Pride, not Wrath, and the distinction matters because Pride is the sin about believing yourself above everything else. He runs the state. He believes in what the state is doing. Both of those things are true at the same time and the show does not flinch from what that means.

Dante

SPOILER!

Antagonist

Exists only in the 2003 anime. Not in the manga. Not in Brotherhood. Entirely original to this version and the reason the second half of the series goes where it goes. An ancient alchemist who has extended her life across centuries by transmuting her soul into successive host bodies, each one discarded when it decays. Connected to Hohenheim in ways the show reveals across the back half of the series. The true architect of everything the homunculi have been doing and the answer to the question the series spends 40 episodes building toward. The 2003 anime lives or dies on whether you accept her as a final villain. It earns it.

Zolf Kimblee

Antagonist

The Crimson Alchemist. Arrays tattooed on both palms that cause targeted explosions. Ishvalan war veteran who did not merely follow orders. He enjoyed it. Imprisoned afterward, which the military treats as a temporary inconvenience when they need him operational again. Cold, articulate, genuinely dangerous in the specific way that people without functional limits are dangerous. His role in the 2003 version's second half involves Scar in ways that pay off the Ishvalan thread with real weight. One of the series' best arguments that the State Alchemist system was rotten at the core.