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Anime is good at many things, but scaring people isn’t one of them, so when I do stumble across something that is really creepy, I tend to remember it. One of those is Nina and Tucker of Fullmetal Alchemist. Tucker, the father, ‘combines’ his little girl, Nina, with her pet dog to create a talking Chimera.

The horror lies not just in the shock of realising what the father has done to his daughter, but voice of the Chimera and how it looks, those white, blank, staring eyes, the depressed tone of its voice; the thing feels like an utter perversion of nature, its every movement an unsettling, disgusting picture of abuse. That a father would do something like this to his daughter, and that this thing still seems capable of comprehending what’s going on around it is just too tragic to accept, and it’s also precisely something like this that separates anime from cartoons the world over.

Fullmetal Alchemist (Brotherhood) is airing in Japan at around 6PM on Sundays, so children are sitting with their parents and watching this stuff as if it’s a perfectly normal thing to do, yet if this same scene aired on BBC One at the same time, I’m convinced the complaints would rain in, because this episode abuses that which most of us hold dearest, the bond between a child and her parents.

When the person you trust in more than anyone else in the world abuses you in such a horrible way, all that’s left is the most horrible, desolate sense of loneliness; even as a chimera, Nina stills follows her dad.