Battle Angel Alita: They Made Anime Real

[dorchadas]

Ereyesterday meowtima invited me to go see Alita: Battle Angel with him and someone else he knows with the same name as me. I went after work, I established dominance over the other me by being one month older than him and unseating his usual place as the oldest in any group, and then we went in to the movie. These are my thoughts.

I knew almost nothing about Battle Angel Alita going in, just a few scraps that sephimb had told me about the manga he read. She was a full-conversion cyborg that had fallen from a floating city and in Japan it was called "Gunnm" (from 銃夢, Ganmu, literally "gun dream"). I had also seen the scene where she's reaching after a broken cyborg who's falling, which meowtima reminded me was in "AMV Hell 3." That's it.

So, here's my first impression after seeing the movie:

Anime.

As.

Hell.

From a Western filmmaking perspective, it's kind of a quirky disaster. People exposit for no reason, the dialogue is often clunky at best and ludicrous at worst, Alita gives a friendship speech, the plotting is too fast-paced, there's a bunch of Proper Nouns that sound ridiculous in English thrown around, and there's a literal "I guess she's older than you thought" joke. But if you've watched enough anime, you recognize all of these as often-used conventions of the medium. I could imagine some of the Japanese the dialogue was translated from (even though it wasn't) in my head, and meowtima told me that some of the scene direction was directly taken from the manga. Terms like "Hunter-Warrior" that sound extremely dumb exist because Japanese entertainment also lifts terms from foreign languages to sound cool and exotic (ハンターウォーリア, hantā uōria). The pacing is just like plenty of anime I've watched where they're trying to cram too much manga into a single season because they're not sure if they're going to get a season two.

I thought it was great.

Visually, it was a cyberpunk dystopia in the "cyberpunk is just Asian cities" mode, with a lot of neon and tall buildings, though very little rain until the end. Early on, there's dialogue that Zolom is the last floating city and the people of Iron City came from all over the world, and the casting did a good job of portraying that. And they didn't put gratuitous kanji everywhere, which is a plus. I got used to Alita's appearance almost immediately--the small chin and big eyes effect looks pretty good in motion, and it wasn't so exaggerated as to trigger the uncanny valley for me. My uncanny valley is pretty strong--I had to basically turn off images on the internet when Google Deep Dream nightmares were in vogue a couple years ago--so that says something. And I really liked the fight scenes, since nearly everyone being a cyborg means that they could be more brutal without being more disturbing.

I went and checked Rotten Tomatoes and Alita: Battle Angel is another one of those films with a gulf between critical and popular opinion. Critics mostly panned it, with one review saying "Like WWI, this film was a dreadful idea." But the audience gave it 94%! It was confusing, and ridiculous, and too earnest. But hey, that's what we like about anime right? As one reviewer said:

It's goofy as hell and borderline inexcusable at times, but it's also kind of glorious.
-Sam Adams, Slate

I'll sign on to that. And so would the other me, who spent big chunks of the movie shaking his head, and staring open-mouthed at the screen, and muttering to himself, and then after he left said he'd go see a sequel if they make one. I would too.

And it looks like Ebookjapan has the 銃夢 manga, so I'll probably buy it!