FMA Movie Staff Revealed.

The FMA movie premiered over in Japan and the staff list has already found its way online. Thanks to liborek3 on Twitter, I posted the staff list over on ANN. As expected, it's a high quality production. There's a couple of animation directors from the new Evangelion movies involved (Shunji Suzuki and Atsushi Okuda), along with a few flash animators that were surely part of this production thanks to Shingo Natsume's involvement (Kenichi Kutsuna, Shingo Yamashita, etc. ). Natsume directed the memorable 6th episode of The Tatami Galaxy and he serves as the unit director here to help execute director Kazuya Murata's storyboard. Some of the other animators include Satoru Utsunomiya (his first work in 2 years), Hidetsugu Ito, Fumiaki Kouta (who animated this a few years back) and Hiroyuki Aoyama to name a few.

Curiously, Kiyotaka Oshiyama is serving as animation director, but he/she is credited with the task in katakana while the other four animation directors are credited in kanji. It's not clear specifically what is supposed to be the difference between the two, but given the placement of the credits it appears that Oshiyama oversaw the 4 animators under Kenichi Konishi's direction with him being the chief animation director. BONES also recently came up with the task "Motion Design" to credit Hironori Tanaka (who also worked on this movie) on the first opening to Star Driver and it's still not clear exactly that entailed either. Hopefully BONES's new approaches to production will be cleared up in the future.

Fullmetal Alchemist: The Star of Milos Full Trailer

Movie comes out in Japan on July 7, 2011. It'll be in theaters over in the US next spring. Animation looks totally sick. Presumably that's Yoshimichi Kameda's work at 1:19. It's getting the usual reactions that it lacks details and shading, and I suspect that pretty soon people will be saying that even the animation quality from the 1st TV series looked better. All of this is nonsense. Yes, they cut down on the shading. Yes, they don't add in as much detail as they would if they just used one frame for a panning shot that takes forever to end. But is everybody so blind to the sheer vigor that's being put into the movement of these characters? The staff has been allowed to go wild and it's clear they're taking advantage of Kenichi Konishi's designs to bring a new spin to the FMA world.

It's clear it'll be worth watching for the animation alone, as the plot doesn't necessarily looks all that interesting. The plot seems to be a side-story and it's getting some backlash on that front alone. But I never heard anybody complain about the novels that were no different in that regard. Hopefully people can look past their predispositions to the norm when it comes to animation and actually appreciate this kind of ambition in the setting of FMA. It's not like the animators are going to stop working like this if they don't.