February 13, 2019 - Battle Angel Alita - the movie! |
| CammyFan.com |
| Battle Angel Alita has had a HUGE influence on my life. Let me tell you about it... |
| My history with Battle Angel Alita goes back to about 1992 when I started reading the Battle Angel Alita manga from Viz. I immediately fell in love with it because the world was very interesting, Alita's personality was really different, and Yukito Kishiro's art style was amazing (he drew with more than one style to fit the mood of the story!). |
| I was already TOTALLY infatuated with Battle Angel Alita when one day in October of 1993, Super Street Fighter 2 came out, and I discovered a new challenger named Cammy! It would take a few years for me to realize that there were a lot of incredible similarities between my 2 favorite characters. I'll talk more about that later. |
| Anyhow, I continued to read the English Battle Angel Alita comic when one day I saw a guy reading a Japanese manga in one of my college classes... and it kinda looked like Alita. I asked him, and he said it was! It looked awesome, but the Japanese manga was years ahead of the English translation. I asked him where I could get the Japanese comics, and he told me about a store in San Fransisco (I was living outside of Sacramento at the time). I headed down there the next day and bought all the Gunnm (the Japanese name of Battle Angel Alita) manga they had! It was cool looking at it, but of course I couldn't read Japanese. |
| I grew up speaking German and English, and I happened to be looking for a non-European language to learn. I had a Japanese roommate and it seemed like a practical language to learn, so I started learning Japanese! But to be honest, I really wanted to read my Gunnm manga. Also, I'd picked up many other Japanese magazines and manga (many were Cammy-related!). |
| Eventually I started to notice that Cammy was very similar to Alita, and I made a page about it. If you go to the Cammy Info Page and click on the "Cammy & Alita" link on the left, you can read it. And there's actually more that came later, and I added much of that to a page called "Create Cammy" (the link is just under "Cammy & Alita"). I'm not at all a guy to believe in 'conspiracy' theories, but I honestly do believe that I'm right about Cammy and Alita! |
| In 1999, I was living in Tokyo, and I actually got in touch with Tsutomu Kishiro, the brother of the writer & author of Gunnm, Yukito Kishiro. We talked quite a bit via e-mail, but I never did contact Yukito himself. However, he did mail me a copy of Aqua Knight 2, which he signed and wrote a little note to me. I was so super-flattered because he's known to be a very reclusive person. Anyhow, while I was e-mailing Tsutomu, he told me that James Cameron, who'd recently directed Titanic, had the rights to the Battle Angel Alita movie! He also asked me to try and contact somebody from the studio because Yukito had some questions. Unfortunately, nobody ever responded to little old me. |
| Well, here we are, 20 years later, and I finally get to see the movie!! To be honest, I have a lot of reservations from what I've seen because of course I'm an absolute loyalist to the original manga, but I'm so hyped nonetheless. James Cameron wrote the screenplay for the movie, and the director has some impressive credits to his name. It looks like it has a good cast, and it's estimated to have a 200 million dollar budget, so you know it wasn't budget! I hope it's a huge success!! I hope more people are inspired to read the original manga, and I hope it somehow makes more people love Cammy too LOL |