Alita, ángel de combate

After watching the terrific movie Alita: Battle Angel, which I felt fell apart towards the end, I decided to watch this to see if the story was the same. It is, and it's also an hour long which means it runs through that story like lightning. There's very little in the way of character development; just lots of plot.

Turns out it's a pretty similar story, and from what I've read the anime and the movie are both fairly true to the original manga but make some changes. Unlike the movie, the anime holds together because it doesn't start throwing in a bunch of stuff that seems crammed in. But it also lacks emotional punch because you're not given a chance to really get to know the characters.

It's not as good as the live-action movie, but it is entertaining enough.

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 is the one that taught me not to judge an anime by its cover. I expected an hour of mindless violence along with a weak story line. Instead, I found myself in a very deep and well developed world for the short time spent in it. It was all story, and an incredibly imaginative place perfect for the story.

It was definately too short. It could have had a great and long lasting series life if they had chosen one. But it was none the less, an enjoying ride, and not a moment of wasted time.

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.

Any serious anime fan will have a special place in his heart for Gally. She is *the* textbook example of the innocent anime girl. Where this work shines is in Gally's character development through her experiences where she discovers a personality of her own after being reanimated. Her gradual acquisition of her defensive affection with the Doctor and her innocent but deep attachment with Yugo are impressive. No fan of good film acting can criticize this "cartoon" as inferior to live action.

All this applies to the Japanese version with subtitles. The English dubbing is awful.