Alita: Battle Angel (2019): the film versus the manga Gunnm

The first manga in this series of articles, Gunnm asks a new question: what happens to a story designed for Japanese black and white when it uses Hollywood motion capture? Source-by-source decryption.

As in each article in this series, only verified information (creators, distribution, dates, publishers) is stated; the comparative analysis is ours, without reproducing dialogue or protected images.

Gunnm (1990): cyberpunk according to Yukito Kishiro

Alita: Battle Angel adapts Gunnm, manga by Yukito Kishiro pre-published from 1990 in the magazine Business Jump by Shueisha, then collected into nine volumes. The story opens with an image that has become iconic: in the giant landfill that extends beneath a city suspended in the sky, Doctor Ido, a cyberdoctor, discovers the intact bust of a cyborg whose brain still functions. He rebuilt it and named it Gally — Alita in Western editions. She has no memories, but her body remembers: from her first fight, she executes movements from a forgotten martial art, panzer kunst, practiced by the warriors of Mars.

Kishiro builds from there a cyberpunk of remarkable density. The dump city, Kuzutetsu, lives off the waste dumped into it by Zalem, the floating city from which no one from below has ever returned; bounty hunters track down criminal cyborgs; and Motorball, a sport of racing and combat between machines, serves as an outlet and an industry. Beyond the action - of assumed graphic violence, with dismembered bodies in each confrontation - the manga asks questions that have made it last: what remains human in an entirely artificial body, and what is the value of a memory that we do not possess? These questions, very present in the Japanese manga of this period, bring Gunnm closer toGhost in the Shell, published a year before him.

Twenty years in the making by James Cameron

The story of the adaptation is almost as long as that of the manga. James Cameron discovered Gunnm in the late 1990s, acquired the rights, and announced the project several times over the years. The film keeps getting pushed back — first behind Avatar, then behind its sequels — to the point of becoming one of the most talked about ghost projects in Hollywood. Cameron ended up entrusting the production to Robert Rodriguez, while retaining the production and co-writing of the screenplay, built on hundreds of pages of notes accumulated over two decades.

This journey explains part of the characteristics of the film. The project matured in parallel with the technologies that Cameron was developing for Avatar: performance capture, relief, digital rendering of faces. Alita is an entirely synthetic character animated from Rosa Salazar's game, in direct technical continuity with the research of the director of Avatar. The considerable budget and the scale of the effects make this film one of the rare manga adaptations produced on this scale by an American studio - a situation which makes its mixed commercial results all the more decisive for the continuation of the genre.

The eyes: the choice that divided

No element of the film has been discussed more than Alita's eyes, digitally enlarged far beyond human proportions. The justification is explicit: reproduce on screen the graphic convention of manga, where large eyes are a universally accepted code of representation. The choice is courageous – it would have been simpler to leave the character with a natural face – and it assumes a formal fidelity rare in Western manga adaptations.

However, it divided, including among readers. The reason lies in a principle that this body of articles regularly encounters: a graphic convention cannot be transposed as is into a photographic medium. In the drawing, the big eyes are not perceived as a physical characteristic of the character but as a reading code; on screen, in an otherwise photorealistic face, they become an anatomical feature, with the strangeness that this produces. It's the same mechanism that makes it difficult to literally transpose superhero costumes or onomatopoeia. For the reader, the experience is instructive: it shows that the most scrupulous visual fidelity can produce an effect less faithful than adaptation, because each medium has its own conventions.

The characters, from paper to screen

• Alita / Gally— The amnesiac cyborg, entirely in computer-generated images.
• Doctor Ido— The cyberdoctor who rebuilds it, faithful to the manga.
• Hugo— The young man from Kuzutetsu, whose romance is developed.
• Vector— The figure of Motorball, played by Mahershala Ali.
• Zalem— The suspended city, engine of the entire universe.

Compress nine volumes into one movie

The film roughly covers the first volumes of the manga and combines several arcs into a single story: the discovery and reconstruction of Alita, her beginnings as a bounty hunter, her relationship with Hugo, and her entry into Motorball. In the manga, these elements are spread over hundreds of pages and do not have the same function - Motorball, in particular, occupies an entire cycle, with its own characters and its sporting progression, while the film only gives a spectacular overview.

Violence is the other big adjustment. Kishiro draws battles of frontal brutality, where cyborg bodies are severed, crushed, disemboweled - the artificial nature of the characters authorizing a crudeness that would be unbearable with human bodies. The film retains the idea but considerably tones down the execution, for obvious reasons of classification. Finally, the feature film closes with an explicit opening towards a sequel, with a major antagonist of the manga barely glimpsed. This sequel was never filmed: the film, despite honorable worldwide receipts driven by Asia, did not reach the threshold required by its budget, and the takeover of its studio by another group closed the door. As with Dredd, a persistent fan campaign hasn't changed anything.

The ending the manga had — and the one it resumed

One point is worth pointing out to readers who approach Gunnm after the film, because it concerns the very structure of the work. The original manga ends after nine volumes with a conclusion that Yukito Kishiro wrote under difficult conditions, and with which he never hid his dissatisfaction. Several years later, he returned to this ending by launching a sequel,Gunnm Last Order, which picks up the story before this ending and takes it in a completely different direction – considerable development of the universe, exploration of space and Alita's Martian origins.

This particularity creates an unusual situation: the work exists with two distinct trajectories, one closed in nine volumes, the other much larger. For the reader, this means that you must choose your path — the compact, dark tale of origins, or the expansive fresco that succeeds it. For the collector, this multiplies the editions and configurations, with notable differences between the Japanese publications and their successive translations. The film does not venture in any of these directions: it stops well before, at the place where the manga was only beginning to unfold its universe.

Where to start reading

To discover the source, the nine volumes of Gunnm by Yukito Kishiro, available in French in several editions including a so-called “perfect” version, constitute the complete story that the film only barely begins. The sequel,Gunnm Last Order, considerably extends the universe for those who want to continue. Let's warn: the graphic violence of the manga is incommensurate with that of the film.

Timeline to know

• 1990— Gunnm begins pre-publication in Business Jump.
• 1990s— Nine volumes; the manga becomes a cyberpunk classic.
• Late 1990s— James Cameron acquires the rights.
• 2019— The film is released after two decades of development.

Collection side: what to aim for after the film

The manga follows a collection logic different from that of American comics. There is no “first number” to graduate: the reference object is the first bound volume of Gunnm, in its original Japanese edition or in its first French edition. Pre-publication magazines, disposable by nature, are much rarer than volumes but little sought after outside Japan. The successive French editions – including the “perfect” versions and the reissues linked to the film – are abundant and inexpensive. It is a market of readers rather than speculators, where the value depends on the edition, the condition and sometimes limited editions. As always, reliance on actual recent sales is strongly recommended.

Its place in the saga and for the collector

Alita: Battle Angel will go down as the most ambitious manga adaptation ever by a Hollywood studio, and as the project of a lifetime for James Cameron. Its most discussed choice—the eyes—illustrates a lesson that goes beyond this film: literal visual fidelity does not necessarily produce a faithful adaptation, because conventions do not cross mediums. For the collector, the work refers to a market of bound volumes rather than fascicles, with its own codes. For the reader, the main thing is in one sentence: the film only tells the beginning, and Kishiro's nine volumes go infinitely further.

The verdict: the faithful universe, the story begun

• Loyalty: the cyborg bust from the junkyard, amnesia and body memory, the city under the hanging city, the bounty hunters, the Motorball and the panzer kunst come from the manga.
• Freedoms: eyes digitally enlarged, several volumes merged into a story, the violence clearly softened, the romance developed and an ending open to a sequel never filmed.
• To collect: the first volume of Gunnm in the original edition or first French edition.

Alita: Battle Angel transposes with considerable care the universe of Yukito Kishiro - the dump, Zalem, Motorball, panzer kunst - but only covers the first volumes, softens its violence and makes the choice discussed with widened eyes. For both the reader and the collector, it is an invitation to open Gunnm.

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