Review for Fairy Tail: Part 6

Introduction

It looks as if Fairy Tail is a show that has learned from the missteps of the shonen anime that have come before it. This past month, the hype that has been flying around the animesphere has been for the return of the Fairy Tail anime in Japan, with updated character designs being proffered on the Internet to sate curious fans. Unlike shows such as Naruto and Bleach, which tend to lapse into extensive stretches of filler as soon as the animators show some likelihood of catching up to the manga, Fairy Tail, other than the odd filler episode here and there, took the decision instead to go on hiatus. For three years and 175 episodes, Fairy Tail went about unfolding its magical story, and then last March it just stopped. After 13 months out, the anime returns to Japanese TV and internet streaming sites this April. Meanwhile Manga Entertainment deliver the next batch of Fairy Tail episodes to come to home video release, and once again I get to look at this show in high definition for Part 6. Next month, Manga will go back and release Parts 1 and 2 (originally released here on DVD only) collected together on Blu-ray, so that Fairy Tail fans can have consistency in their collections.

The Kingdom of Fiore is a rather special place, a nation of some 17 million where magic exists, is commonplace, and is a commodity to be bought and sold. Those who become proficient in magic are the wizards, and together they form guilds to serve the community, or serve themselves. The most famous, and indeed the most infamous guild of them all is Fairy Tail. 17-year-old Lucy Heartfilia is a wizard, or rather she wants to be a wizard. She’s already skilled in a Celestial magic, able to summon spirits to do her bidding using Gatekeys. Her dream is to be in Fairy Tail, and when she meets a travelsick young wizard named Natsu, and his talking cat companion Happy, it seems like destiny has brought them together. Now Lucy has joined the Fairy Tail Guild, and with its unique roster of wizards, including Natsu, the ice wizard Gray Fullbuster, and the armour wizard Erza Scarlet, and the flying cat Happy, they undertake the toughest, the most challenging, and the weirdest of missions.


Manga Entertainment release the next twelve episodes of Fairy Tail across two discs, and this collection continues on from the previous release, with the Fairy Tail guild teaming up with three others to confront the dark Oracion Seis guild, and prevent their plans for world domination from succeeding. But when they’ve resurrected Jellal, and got their hands on the balance magic that turns light to dark, and taken control of Nirvana, the giant walking city, setting course for the Cait Shelter Guild as their first point of conquest, the allied guilds are very much on the back foot.

Disc 1

61. Super Aerial Battle: Natsu vs. Cobra!
62. Wizard Saint Jura
63. Your Words
64. Zero
65. From Pegasus to Fairies
66. The Power of Feelings
67. I’m With You
68. A Guild For One

Disc 2
69. Call of the Dragon
70. Natsu vs. Gray
71. Friendship Overcomes the Dead
72. A Fairy Tail Wizard

Picture

Blu-ray should mean sharp, crystal clear, high definition animation. Not so much with Fairy Tail though, as while the show does get a 1080p widescreen presentation at the 1.78:1 aspect ratio, it’s clear that the show was animated at a lower resolution and scaled up. It looks little different from the DVD presentation, soft and with somewhat muted colours. I also get the feeling, given the odd bit of judder in pans and scrolls, particularly during the credit sequences, that it’s been converted to a progressive format from an interlaced source. What the HD presentation does offer is clarity and smoothness of character artwork, with no aliasing to speak of, and compression artefacts completely absent. And you do get a 24 fps progressive presentation, without any of the PAL speed-up or pitch correction that you would get with a PAL DVD. That alone is reason enough to opt for the Blu-ray.

The image is clear and generally very pleasant too watch. It’s a bright, lively anime, and given that it’s a long running series, the character designs are understandably simplistic, the world design not overly complex. It’s full of primary colours, and the animation itself is energetic, especially through the various spell sequences.

The images in this review are sourced from the PR, and aren’t necessarily representative of the final retail release.

Sound

You have the choice between Dolby TrueHD 5.1 Surround English, and Dolby TrueHD 2.0 Stereo Japanese, with optional translated subtitles and a signs only track. You do get the added clarity and range of a lossless presentation, but it’s still pretty similar to the DVD, although I must once again reiterate that it’s at the native frame rate and without any speed-up or pitch correction. I sampled the English dub, and found it to be a typical anime comedy dub, high pitched female voices, and loudness and manic intensity substituting for humour. My preference as always was for the Japanese audio track with the subtitles. It too is adequate, although one slight point of annoyance for some may be the lead character of Lucy played by Aya Hirano, who simply supplies another variation of her stock Haruhi Suzumiya tsundere voice. Otherwise it’s a fairly run of the mill audio track, playing the show for laughs, with little yet to stretch the characters. More impressive is the show’s music, which with a pop Celtic theme supplements the show’s magical themes very well, although it is boosted by a wholesale plundering of the classical music archives. The subtitles are clear, well timed, and free of error throughout and with a nice smooth HD font.

Extras

The discs get animated menus, and appear to be the Funimation discs repackaged, given the FBI warning and the US trailers. No localisation here from Madman...

Disc 1 autoplays with a trailer for Guilty Crown, and has on it an audio commentary that accompanies episode 64 presented by ADR Director Tyler Walker with voice actors Philip Webber (Brain/Zero), and Micah Solusod (Midnight). It’s a nice interesting, and informative commentary, with a little bit of scene specificity, and some character observations.


Disc 2 autoplays with a trailer for Last Exile: Fam The Silver Wing, and on the disc you’ll find further trailers for Legend of the Legendary Heroes, Eureka Seven AO, Lupin III: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine, Sengoku Basara, and the Remnant Knights game all in HD, as well as SD trailers for Chrome Shelled Regios and One Piece.

There’s also the US trailer for this release of Fairy Tail, and the textless credits.

The commentary on this disc accompanies episode 70, and features Todd Haberkorn (Natsu) and Gwendolyn Lau (Daphne) with ADR director Tyler Walker. When the first five minutes are devoted to Lau’s jaw surgery, you can guess this is one of those Funimation in-house gossip commentaries, and you won’t miss anything by ignoring it.

Conclusion

Looking ahead, I see that I may have spoken too soon about filler episodes in Fairy Tail. Should Manga Entertainment ever get as far as Collection 9 of this series then we’ll be looking at a stretch of filler long enough to do Bleach proud. I suppose that might have been the trigger for the year long pause. This fourth collection of Fairy Tail also has to contend with the dreaded F-word, but in this case it’s just a mere four episodes. That it’s the final four episodes tends to take the shine off an otherwise stellar addition to the Fairy Tail canon, but I don’t suppose there’s a lot that we can do about where an episode is placed in a collection.


It was a bit of an uncomfortable reintroduction for me to the Fairy Tail universe with the last collection, as I had completely forgotten what the show was about, had difficulty reengaging with the characters, and had no memory of the story and the situations that had transpired. That the Oracion Seis arc that was about to unfold relied heavily on the events that had occurred in earlier episodes, reintroducing previously encountered characters, made it problematic to get back into. I did persevere though, and by the end of that set of episodes, I had begun to feel just what it was that so appealed to me about this show in the first place.

The first eight episodes in this collection conclude the Oracion Seis arc, with our heroes battling the resurrected Magical WMD Nirvana, and the Oracion Seis dark magic guild behind its resurrection. With these episodes, I was once more reengaged with the show, I got the characters, and I was invested in the action sequences, willing on the heroes to beat the villains, feeling a hint of trepidation when it looked like they might not succeed, and fully partaking of that vicarious triumph when they did. In short, I was in full Fairy Tail appreciation mode, and found that balance of comedy, action, drama and tragedy warm and familiar.


While the first few members of Oracion Seis had been dealt with in the previous collection, the few that remain offered a greater challenge to the Fairy Tail wizards and their allies, and not least that with the Nirvana now in motion, Natsu has to deal with travel sickness as well as his foes. Cobra has his own Dragon Slayer powers with which to counter Natsu, Midnight has the ability to control his foes’ actions and perceptions, there’s a talking skull thrown into the mix, and behind it all is the leader of Oracion Seis himself, Zero, whose passion for destruction exceeds rationality. To make it all even more complicated, Jellal has been resurrected; although not everyone is certain if he is friend or foe. Individual battles, a race against time, unexpected salvation, imminent doom. It’s all great, watchable action entertainment, which manages to feed the gut, the mind and the heart. The climax is an utterly satisfying ‘Hell Yeah!’ moment that justifies investing in the show, while the aftermath reveals the truth about Cait Shelter, and Fairy Tail get a new, cute member for their ranks, while Happy has a cute flying female cat to woo.

Then comes the filler, four episodes worth on disc 2 of the collection. With Wendy getting an introduction to Fairy Tail, she and Natsu hear a rumour that they simply have to investigate, that of an actual dragon being witnessed outside the town. That it’s Gray who bring them the rumour tends to add to its credibility, although he points to a woman named Daphne as the source. When it turns out that Daphne is actually setting a trap for Natsu, the town of Magnolia is threatened once more, and Gray’s loyalty is called into question. It’s a simple story, not all that well told, and one that once again reinforces the values of friendship, loyalty, and a refusal to surrender that is common in shows like this. The problem is that doubting a main character’s loyalty and testing people’s commitment to simple values like this should really come at the start of the series, not 120 episodes in where the main story is getting a lot more complex and interesting than this. As such, I found the final four episodes of this collection, surprisingly tedious for Fairy Tail, and actually dropped off twice during the story’s climax. It also seems that there are three more episodes of filler destined for the start of collection 7, but hopefully they’ll just be single episode stories instead of a whole and ineffective story arc like this one.


Fairy Tail’s 6th Collection is good, reliable entertainment, and the conclusion of the main Oracion Seis arc reminds us of what is so appealing about the show in the first place. The filler end is a bit of a disappointment though, but the disc will still slot in quite happily next to the other Fairy Tail releases so far.