Review for Fairy Tail: Part 7

Introduction

As Crunchyroll begin streaming the newest season of Fairy Tail, they’ve also dusted off the original series and made that available for streaming again, although annoyingly, once again the UK is left out of the loop for all but the newest episodes. Fortunately Manga Entertainment are continuing apace with their release of that series on DVD and now Blu-ray, and we can at least see up to Part 7, episode 84 of the series legally in the UK. That still leaves a bit of a gap though, and who wants to have 90 episodes of Fairy Tail spoiled by jumping ahead to episode 1 of the second series?

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 begins with the Fairy Tail Guild making their newest recruits Wendy and Charle welcome.

Disc 1
73. Rainbow Cherry Blossoms
74. Wendy’s First Big Job!?
75. 24-Hour Endurance Road Race
76. Gildarts
77. Earth Land
78. Edolas
79. Fairy Hunter
80. Key of Hope

Disc 2
81. Fireball
82. Welcome Home
83. Extalia
84. Fly, To Our Friends!

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. However this was less evident in this seventh collection than it has been in previous releases. 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 the plastic widescreen Blu-ray release of Dragon Ball Z, not the decently restored Level sets that Funimation cancelled after two instalments.

You get a commentary on episode 74 with ADR Director Tyler Walker and actors Jad Saxton (Charle), and Brittney Karbowski (Wendy). I fell asleep halfway through and can’t tell you what the commentary was about.

I did keep my eyes open for the episode 79 commentary, with the show’s writers Monica Rial and Josh Greele joining Tyler Walker to talk about adapting the show into English. Note that there are a fair few spoilers here for the Edolas arc, so you might want to leave this commentary track until afterwards.

Disc 2 has the latest textless credits, the US trailer for this collection, and further trailers for the Fairy Tail Movie: Phoenix Priestess, Eureka Seven, Guilty Crown, Serial Experiments Lain, Aquarion Evol and the Anime Classics label in HD, and One Piece in SD.

Conclusion

I’ve been trying to recapture that glow of appreciation that I initially had for Fairy Tail. Its comedy shonen style is a whole lot of fun, and the closest thing you can get in anime to One Piece without setting sail on the Grand Line. I fell in love with the show with its first four instalments released here by Manga, but there was that lengthy gap before more could be licensed and localised. When Part 5 showed up at the end of last year, it might have been on Blu-ray, but it certainly wasn’t as shiny and exciting as those first four DVD releases. I thought it was just me; that the wait had somehow tarnished the show, but revisiting the first two parts in HD, now that Manga are re-releasing the start of the show on Blu-ray merely served to confirm my suspicion, the beginning of Fairy Tail really was better. Parts 5 and 6 just felt like the show was spinning its wheels, randomly throwing a few ideas at the screen in the hope of recapturing lightning in a bottle.


When Part 7 arrived, and it kicked off with a handful of standalone episodes, I had a sinking sense of déjà vu. I had seen this before. Fairy Tail looked as if it had gone right to the beginning and started again. Except that this turns out to be a very good thing. At the end of Part 6, Wendy had been welcomed into the Fairy Tail guild, a little girl who happens to be a Dragon Slayer just like Natsu and Gajeel, and she has her own flying cat in tow as well, a little female feline named Charle. Part 7 felt just like Part 1, only with Wendy now taking the place of Lucy, as the new recruit to Fairy Tail. She gets to know the various characters, the town of Magnolia, in a handful of standalone stories which are heavy on the comedy, and light on the drama. These episodes even restore the voice over prologue from the first episodes of the series, a quick reminder of what the show is all about. There’s a gentle story about the Fairy Tail wizards attending a blossom viewing party, Wendy’s first job for the guild turns out to be a bit of a farce, the guild takes part in a road race to ensure their stamina, and the usual suspects get overly competitive, and there’s the introduction of a new character, the Guild’s strongest member Gildarts, and as usual all of these stories add to the characters and fill in some more about their back stories.

This was just how the series originally started, when Lucy was still getting acquainted with her new home before the first big arc kicked off. Earth Land marks the start of the new Edolas arc in this collection of Fairy Tail, and just as it was back in the beginning, this is where the good stuff begins. It also promises to fill in some back-story on Happy and Charle, the flying cats and who up to this point just looked like comic relief mascot characters. It turns out that there really is something more to them as the Edolas arc unfolds.


Edolas is a world that exists in parallel to the Fairy Tail universe, dubbed Earth Land by the Edolas residents. The big difference is that magic is a finite resource, and consequently, the king of Edolas has decided to import magic from Earth Land to fill up his magic coffers. Import is too gentle a word, he’s actually stealing it, through the Anima spell, where vast vortices of energy open up over Earth Land and literally suck up the magic. The Anima spell doesn’t discriminate; it sucks up everything, people, buildings, whole cities, which then get turned into a crystal in Edolas, ready to be drained of its magic. At the start of the Edolas arc, that’s what happens to Magnolia and the Fairy Tail guild, with only a few survivors left behind to pick up the pieces. It falls to Wendy, Natsu, Charle and Happy to travel to Edolas to try and rescue their friends. But they aren’t the only survivors of the Anima spell, while it turns out that other denizens of Edolas have been in Earth Land all along, some of them working against the king of Edolas. Of course rescuing their friends isn’t easy in a world where their magic doesn’t work, so they have to look for local help.

And that’s where the fun of this arc begins. Parallel worlds and mirror universes are always enjoyable, as you get to see familiar characters in unfamiliar guises. Edolas too has a Fairy Tail guild, with some recognisable characters, but most of these characters have diametrically opposing personalities to their Earth Land counterparts. We get to meet an overdressed and clingy Gray, hanging on every word of the dismissive Juvia, there’s the meek Elfman, and of course the Scary Lucy. This world’s Natsu turns out to be something of a cry-baby, although you wouldn’t blame ‘our’ Natsu for tearing up when he learns that Lisanna is alive in Edolas. Scariest of all is Erza, who turns out to be a villain, and who’s hunting down the dark guild Fairy Tail. But with their new friends, Wendy and Natsu and the cats set forth to the royal city. On the way they find their Lucy, who was rescued and sent to Edolas by Mystogan, and it strangely turns out that Lucy’s Gate Key magic does work in Edolas where everyone else’s doesn’t. It also turns out that the third Dragon Slayer Gajeel has also made his way to Edolas, and run into his mild-mannered news reporter counterpart, and somehow the two find commonalities in each other’s characters that don’t exist.


But the biggest reveal is about Happy and Charle, as it turns out that their origins lie in Edolas, that they were sent as eggs to Earth Land with missions to accomplish, and that by inadvertently doing so, they may have betrayed those that they care most about.

Fairy Tail is back! Part 7 delivers the Fairy Tail that I fell in love with back in Parts 1-4, and I couldn’t be happier. It’s got the characters, it’s got the comedy, it has the action, and every once in a while, it makes you feel like you’re swallowing a hockey stick. And no, I didn’t get in the slightest misty-eyed during the final episode of this collection. It was just hay fever, a speck of dust in my eye. Just... go away will you! Stop being so mean!