The fifth and sadly penultimate volume of Fantastic Children squashes fears that the series wasn’t progressing forward, as things start to take off at a lightning like pace.

Quickly resolving the “flashbacks” of Princess Tina’s life, Helga reawakened to her past lives (and a snazzy new hair colour) refuses to return to planet Greece. Thoma unable to control his emotions over Helga’s reasons for staying behind runs off into the forest. The Children of Befort begin to look in to returning to their old bodies, temporarily parting ways as some stay to protect Helga. Meanwhile it’s the long awaited (well at least on my part) of Detective Cooks, as he returns to the Ged Group’s HQ and has a run in with the Children of Befort. Dumas, Tina’s half brother, gets a lot of attention in

this volume, with far more screen time and more of his background being revealed. Things begin to speed up however, when Dumas Kidnaps Helga to forcibly return her soul to Tina’s body through a large machine for opening “The Zone”. It’s up to Chitto, Thoma and the Children of Befort to stop the machine and rescue Helga before all hell breaks loose.

Volume five is certainly the most emotional so far. As the story of Tina’s life on planet Greece concludes, the background of Dumas and Detective Cooks and Professor Gherta’s separate encounters with the Children of Befort are all rather emotionally charged. Most of them have some feeling of tragedy even the seemingly incidental Detective Cooks, who for some unknown (although likely to be reviled in the next volume) reason is reduced to tears

upon his short meeting with Aghi. Dumas who had really been seen as the villain up until now is given a much more sympathetic light, as we see the almost horrific sequences of Dumas childhood.

Fantastic Children certainly seems to excel at these scenes, truly unnerving the viewer at times yet keeping things extremely mild visually. There are a few splatters of blood here and there but the real violence is often happening off-screen, yet it is quite clear what is happening and the mental image created is far more bone-chilling and disturbing than actually showing the events (this also allows it to get away with a lower classification).

Where this volume seems to fall down though is with some rather unnecessary use of CGI. Due to Fantastic Children’s simpler, yet beautiful, art style

the CGI often sticks out like a sore thumb and while not unimpressive it does distract. The problem hasn’t been absent from the earlier volumes, like when the Children of Befort cut the Enma shadows CGI was used to show them turn to stone but they ended up looking like large CGI grey condoms. While these are thankfully absent, there is far more CGI and it just doesn’t look all that good.

Despite this Fantastic Children Volume five just keeps adding to what has to be the surprise hit of the year, yet so much rests on the final volume. With such a narrative driven show it is difficult to imagine that the ending will be nothing short of spectacular, anything less is bound to do harm to the series as a whole.