Fullmetal Alchemist the Movie: Conqueror of Shamballa

This picture serves as the full-length conclusion to the 2003 anime, a series that loosely reworked the manga's plot. Produced by Bones and distributed by Shochiku, it unfolds roughly two years past the show's finale, staging most of its events in 1923 Germany while also visiting Reole, Central City, and the Underground City. The film picks up the thread of Edward Elric being cast beyond the Gate into the real world.

A brief prologue set during the television run shows Edward and Alphonse dismantling the schemes of a rogue alchemist named Huskisson before the story leaps forward. The main tale finds Edward stranded past the Gate in Munich of 1923, working as a rocket engineer beside Alfons Heiderich, the real-world double of his brother. Back in Amestris, Alphonse searches for a way to pull Edward home. Ed rescues Noah, a Romani woman hunted for her mind-reading gift, while the pro-Nazi Thule Society, mistaking Amestris for the mythical paradise of Shamballa, tears open a doorway between the two worlds.

The society captures the Homunculus Envy, now shaped like a dragon, and uses his blood along with the brothers' father Hohenheim to power its gateway. Edward eventually breaches their headquarters, and a chain of accidents opens the passage that briefly lets Alphonse cross over for a reunion. In Amestris, the childhood friend Winry Rockbell learns that Izumi Curtis has died, and a battered Wrath gives himself up together with Gluttony to seal one end of the portal. Meanwhile Dietlinde Eckhart, who leads the Thule Society, launches an armored invasion fleet through the Gate, determined to conquer the land she believes lies beyond.

Hohenheim sacrifices himself to widen the passage, and Alfons launches Edward back toward Amestris in a rocket-driven aircraft before dying of his wounds. Reunited at last, the brothers join Roy Mustang and Alex Louis Armstrong to beat back Eckhart's warships over Central Command. Edward turns her own armored troops against her using soul fragments Alphonse had planted in their suits, then flies the flagship back through the Gate, where the surviving counterpart of Hughes shoots Eckhart dead. Choosing Earth as their new home, the brothers resolve to dismantle both ends of the portal so it can never reopen, and after Alfons' funeral they set off together to destroy a uranium bomb.

The feature runs about 105 minutes, reached Japanese screens on July 23, 2005, and opened in North America the following September. Its story receives a loose continuation in the Kids OVA, which imagines a hundred-year-old Edward who never returned from Earth, though whether that short counts as canon has never been confirmed. Funimation's North American rights lapsed in 2016, after which Aniplex of America took over English distribution, and the film can be streamed on Crunchyroll.

Much of the drama leans on real history, staging its events amid the unrest of Weimar Germany, the reparations that followed the Treaty of Versailles, and the earliest stirrings of the Nazi Party while it remained a fringe movement. The film even imagines this Germany as the first nation to hold nuclear arms. Smaller continuity notes surface throughout, including the detail that Hughes' double still lives on Earth despite the character's death in Amestris, and that both Envy and Wrath have already lost their special powers before the story begins.