What is The Sacred Star of Milos?
Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos opened in Japanese cinemas on July 2, 2011, a year after Brotherhood finished airing. Unlike Conqueror of Shamballa, which had to end a television series, Milos carries no continuity weight: it is a self contained adventure slotted into the middle of Brotherhood's timeline, when the Elric brothers are still traveling and the final arcs have not begun.
The plot follows a prison break. An alchemist named Melvin Voyager escapes custody, and the trail leads the brothers to Table City on the Creta border and down into the valley of Milos, where a dispossessed people are building a weapon around a blood fueled stone and a young alchemist, Julia Crichton, is trying to free her homeland. The valley's layered city, drawn from location research and rendered in long vertical compositions, is the film's signature visual.
Kazuya Murata directed, with a looser, rougher animation style than the television series: character art shifts toward sketchier lines and the action favors fluid, exaggerated movement, a deliberate experiment that divides viewers. Hiroki Kanno supervised the Brotherhood designs while guest animators pushed individual sequences toward their own styles, making Milos a favorite of animation focused fans despite its side story status.
Funimation brought the film to North American screens in early 2012 with the Brotherhood dub cast returning, and released it on Blu-ray and DVD that spring as a standalone disc rather than inside a series set. Japanese releases included a limited edition with a bonus disc of production material. Because it sits outside the box sets, Milos is one of the few Brotherhood era discs a collector must buy separately to be complete.
As storytelling it adds world rather than plot: Creta, the western neighbor country the manga only names, gets a face, and the film's valley community echoes the series' themes about who pays for alchemy. Watch it after Brotherhood episode 20 or so, or after the whole series; nothing in it depends on or changes the ending.
