Battle Angel Alita

The movie is based on a manga by Yukito Kishiro, which is generally seen as one of the better manga's out there.

For the unknowing: A manga is essentially a comic, japan-style. Most of the drawing is in black and white, quite in contrast to the western style comics. The drawing style however is a lot more realistic, save for the faces, than western comics. The faces are caricatures of how they would really look, but, this makes that feelings are conveyed a lot better than any western comic ever can. As it is stated in a Gunnm (or Battle Angel Alita outside of Japan) review, you can see in an instant how Alita is feeling, and the same goes for a lot of other characters.

Here comes the difference between a manga and an anime: Manga is Japanese style comic, Anime is Japanese style animation (mind you, NOT cartoon!). The difference is often forgotten, but should be pointed out.

Anyway, back to the anime: Gunnm is a 60 minute adaptation of the first 2 graphic novels of the comic. The movie is roughly divided in half, although the story flows through entirely. I can say beforehand: the movie is a very WEAK adaptation of the books. Nothing more, nothing less. It has been westernized too much. The character Chiren doesn't even appear in the books, and the big guy Alita defeats twice has an entirely different role (and not for the better).

The movie has been westernized to much in the sense that is has been simplified. Add a character tehre, make it quasi a double love story, add some fights and you're done. The entire path of discovery of Alita is left out (her fighting style, the Panzer Kunst, is essential to what thrives her to live on and discover where she's from, but the concept is entirely left out of the movie).

On itself, you can call the movie okay, but when you've read the books, it simply doesn't reach the level of the latter.

All in all, the animation is good, even very good. In terms of visual quality it ranks up right next to Ghost in the Shell in my books, while not being as realistic and dark, the fluent movement is very good while still remaining in the spirit of anime (watch the documentary on the Animatrix DVD to know what i mean with that).

The English voices are very much out of place, they are way too excited for the situations they're in, as if they were doing voices for any pokemon movie. That's what really brings down the movie, please try and watch it in Japanese with English subtitles if possible. English just doesn't cut it, but that goes for virtually every anime every dubbed in English.

To sum it up: This movie is a good 1 hour watch, and some may even want to watch it more. However, there's a lot of things that bring the movie down, especially when you;ve read the manga first.

If you watched this movie, buy the manga (starting with the first one of course, there are 14 translated graphic novels as of today) and read it, you'll be hooked. If you do it the other way around you'll only be disappointed.

just as a movie, the android Gally is put together by technical and live parts that together work as an emotional unit. In this future the borders between machine and man is wiped out and cybernetic parts are as respected as biological. A future like this might not be impossible with the growing tolerance of body enhancements such as plastic surgery and piercing.

This is an anime movie that succeed to deliver so much more emotion and vitality than many many live-action movies. The upcoming live action movie's actors will never succeed to reflect emotions as the animated eyes of these anime-characters.

For me, this is in first hand a love story, one of the most touching i've seen. The fact that Gally is a robot and might not know how to love is never put up. No, the plot is more sophisticated than "is an android capable of loving?". Gunnm is about social classes, chasing dreams and most of all finding a place for those refusing to be apart of the world of violence they are thrown in to.

I love this movie, I absolutely do, maybe my opinion is colored by me being very sensitive to the "robot/man - man/robot" theme, i often dream about androids wanting to be human ore humans finding out they are human, and what more suitable theme for a movie than androids to raise questions about humanity and sympathy?

At first the whole thing with Gally being built as a "warrior" machine fails to impress me, I know It's a vital part of the plot but the fighting parts... It's just taking pleasure in super-violence, the monsters are really but-ugly. But then I figured the violence-theme is really just contributing to the sense of this grim fictional-world and the contrast to this which is the love story of the film. The two sides of Gallys persona is highly contributing to the complexity of the whole movie. Though i still consider it to be some unnecessary amount of "gore".

Make sure to see this before the Cameron live-action in 2009!

This was simply an amazing piece of artwork. This movie had the potential to be right up there next to Akira and Ghost in the Shell. Unfortunately there's just way too much left out, leaving you with a feeling that you've been conned out of a great movie. Gally (the main chick / hero) is the most beautiful anime babe out there. Overall, it's a movie an anime fan will like, but will long for more.... Find the comic books for more.

Can't help but think that the English title "Battle Angel Alita" is probably just a wimp out for "Lolita". Remind me, eyeballs should be *smaller* than fists, right? That said, Battle Angel is thankfully free of teeny sex, although the ubiquitous brief glimpse of nekkid adult lady is pubic hair free, which I always find quite disturbing.

The animation is fine, although the scale of characters varies wildly, with Alita shrinking to almost Tinkerbelle proportions in some shots. Also, gravity seems to have a particularly tenuous hold on our little protagonist (even for anime!) and she does spend a fair bit of time just staring wide eyed.

Voice talent in the English dub is par for the course for anime, i.e. pretty dire. Alita at least has a distinctive cutesy mock-English timbre. The baddies are all instantly identifiable by their voices, which is frankly insulting and doesn't help to convince sceptics (or me, to be honest) that anime is more than a kiddie cartoon gone rabid.

There's some attempt at characterisation among the protagonists, but a fifty something minute runtime isn't enough time to expand on one fall/redemption story, let alone three or four. In fact, the whole thing is wrapped up and ended very abruptly in the last few minutes. It feels forced and unfinished, and smacks of series pilot.

Still, it was clearly a classy bit of animation before the translators got their hands on it. As usual, I'm left with the feeling that it's an opportunity wasted, and that a subtitled version would probably be much more enjoyable - as is definitely the case with Akira.

I had the opportunity to sit down and watch the 1993 Anime mini-series "Gunnm" (aka "Battle Angel") again here in 2023, and since I really enjoyed it on VHS tape back in my youth, of course there was no doubt about me sitting down to watch "Gunnm" digitally this time around.

The storyline in "Gunnm" is pretty straight forward, but even with just two episodes, the writers did manage to put together something unique, enjoyable and timeless. "Gunnm" is an Anime that you can watch again and again, which is a testimony to the writing skills of the writers.

And not only was the storyline good, but the art and animation in "Gunnm" is good, and very much still holds up today, 30 years down the line.

If you enjoy Anime, and get a chance to watch, then you most certainly should do so. It is without a doubt a timeless classic.

The only downside there is to "Gunnm", is that the mini-series only had two episodes, and thus felt a little bit rushed. I think there was much more to delve into here, if the writers had opted for more episodes.

My rating of "Gunnm" lands on a seven out of ten stars.