Anime fans I thought that with Alita: Battle Angel coming out in a few months time that now would be the right time to go and revisit the 1993 original OVA just to see if the movie even has a chance of being good and well here are my thoughts on Battle Angel.
Now here I would normally tell you what the plot is but since this is a two part OVA and both parts have different plots i'm going to do my best to tell the plot for both parts so the plot for episode one Rusty Angel is a professor finds the remains of a robot girl and rebuilds her in the process building a strong bond with her but that bond is threatened when someone called Chiren rebuilds her own person and gets him to try and kill our main hero.
The plot for the second episode called Tears Sign is the robots friend finds himself in a life or death situation and our main hero must try and get him out of it while at the same time trying to keep him alive. If i';m being honest I prefer the plot for the first episode just because that episode has a plot to begin with but at the same time this episode has a really emotional and dare I say it bleak ending so in this case I can't say which story I prefer because both of them work on different levels.
Now I know you've seen the title of this review so I don't need to say that i'm reviewing the dubbed version of this OVA but to let you all know i'm reviewing the American ADV version of the film so starring in this series is Amanda Winn Lee as Gally / Alita , Guil Lunde as Dr. Egon Spengler (yes I know that's not his name but i'll get more into that later) , Spike Spencer as Yugo , Brian Granveldt as Grewcica and Laura Chapman as Chiren. I have to admit that the acting in this series is alot better then what I thought it would be in my head I thought that the acting was going terrible because this is a nineties dub those weren't always the best so I was really shocked to see some actually good acting my personal favorite actor in this series was Amanda Winn Lee as Gally / Alita I honestly thought that her voice suited the character perfectly.
This OVA actually has two dubs one of them features the above cast and has alot of the names of certain characters changed but there is another dub which was released in the UK by Manga Entertainment sadly tho it was only released on VHS and there hasn't been a DVD release yet but I have a feeling that with the movie coming out next year then that might be a about to change but I still have to wonder why they would produce two different dubs or better yet why ADV would change the names of characters.
The animation for the OVA was done by Animate Film and I have to say that while the animation isn't anything mind blowing it is still pretty good you can tell that there is a lot of care and effort gone into the animation and I think that's because the animation team saw this as a chance for them to really make there name in my opinion it didn't work because no one knows who they are but it was a solid effort none the less.
Now I believe I promised you a reason as to why I called the professor Egon well that's because he looks so much like Egon from The Real Ghostbusters like i'm pretty sure that the creative team behind this OVA were fans of that show so they included Egon's character model in here but to me it was very distracting because everytime he showed up I would just start singing the ghostbusters theme song.
I said this at the start of the review but my main reason for watching the OVA is because of the upcoming movie and because of that I was mentally seeing how things would play if they do appear in that film and I have to say that for me the best ending for the film would have to be the one from the end of episode one since it's so action packed that it gives you the best ending you could hope for in anime adaptation.
I'll admit I wasn't expecting there to be any amount of gore in this OVA but there was a lot of it and honestly i'm not to sure how I feel about it on the one hand it doesn't really distract from the story of any of the episodes but at the same it feels like it's out of place in this show it's almost as if the makers of the OVA felt that in the wake of Akira that they felt like they had to add in gore to make it seem more adult without realizing that it can be adult just by it's plot and themes and not by how much gore is on screen.
I said that the second and final episode has a pretty sad ending and it's that ending that makes me say that this is an anime really made for adults because in the ending Gally / Alita's best friend / love interest dies and while that is a rather sad ending to me it could also be seen as a bleak ending because now Gally / Alita is trapped in this city that she's been trying to get out of and there's no way out for her this might be something that i'm looking far to much into but if I don't then some other a**hole will.
This OVA does have a lot of action scenes and honestly for me they were some of the best scenes in the whole OVA not that everything else was bad it's just that in those scenes that's where we got alot of the really cool stuff and it made me wish that the whole thing was like that I love a good thinking man's anime as much as the next guy but when your main character is a robot you want to see her beat alot of people up in really cool and awesome ways.
Overall i'm glad that I have seen this anime because now when I see the movie in February i'll at least have a base knowledge of the franchise and it's characters but I don't think it's a must watch for any anime fan it gets a 6.5 out of 10 from me.