Valentine's Day 2019 will see the release of
Alita: Battle Angel, James Cameron's return to the big screen as writer and producer, with Robert Rodriguez in the director's chair. The movie is based on Japanese writer/artist Yukito Kishiro's 1990 manga series, which was translated into English and republished by Viz Comics in 1992 - as far as I know, I still have three or four years of the black and white Viz editions tucked away in storage with the rest of my comics.
The comic book version of
Battle Angel Alita tells the tale of a have/have not world where the sky is dominated by the isolated floating city of Tiphares*, which rains down its trash onto the Junkyard that lies below. Cyberphysician Daisuke Ido, an exile from the city, is wandering through the piles of junk in search of spare parts when he stumbles upon a discarded cyborg head and upper torso which still holds life. He takes this fragment of a person back to his laboratory and repairs it.
He names his discovery Alita - she has no memories of her name, or of her life before her re-awakening in the lab. However, when she discovers that Ido has a second life as a bounty hunter, she also learns that her subconscious mind contains an instinctive knowledge of
Panzer Kunst - the "Armoured Art", an acrobatic cyborg martial arts technique originally created for zero-gravity combat.
The comic follows Alita as she also becomes a bounty hunter, finds - and loses - love, participates in the brutal and deadly sport of Motorball, and eventually ends up as a ground agent for the rulers of Tiphares. From what I gather from the trailers, the movie combines the first three parts of Alita's life into a single plot. Based on those same trailers, the movie completely nails the visual style of the comics - and that's where I'm concerned.
For the most part, the quality of the art direction is a good thing. The sets look good, and the casting is spot-on: Christoph Waltz is perfect for Alita's enigmatic saviour Dr. Ido, Mahershala Ali is identical to the villainous Vector, and the glimpses that we see of the more robotic cyborgs are an excellent evocation of the over-the-top cyberpunk look of the manga.
However, it's the character of Alita, as played by 33-year-old actress Rosa Salazar, that worries me. Her digitally reworked face is intended to match the stylized manga convention for wide-eyed female characters, and I can't help but feel that it pushes her character into the trap that has captured so many computer-generated characters: the Uncanny Valley.
The concept of the Uncanny Valley was introduced by Japanese robotics professor Masahiro Mori in 1970 to describe the negative reaction that people often have to near-duplicates of humanity. As representations of a person get closer and closer to reality, the response becomes more and more positive up until a point where it dips down sharply before ascending once again. That dip in the curve is the Uncanny Valley.
The problem is that we perceive these almost-but-not-quite perfect copies of humanity as being weird or creepy - the "uncanny" part of the term.
Computer animation is constantly flirting with the Valley. The characters in the 2007 film
Beowulf, 2001's
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within,
The Polar Express from 2004 and the digital Princess Leia** from
Rogue One in 2016 are often cited as prime examples of Valley - characters that come disconcertingly close to achieving life, but not close enough. The Alita that I've seen in the trailers, with her enlarged anime eyes, may be sliding into the Valley as well.
It seems odd to pick on her modified facial features when the movie is full of extravagant combinations of human and machine, but as the concept of the Valley suggests, it's the closeness to actual humanity that creates the disconnect. The less human a character looks, the less likely they are to trigger that sense of dissonance that characterizes the Uncanny Valley.
That being said, I'm willing to trust Cameron's instincts. After all, the same sort of comments might be made about the semi-feline blue aliens from
Avatar, and audiences seemed to have no problem spending close to three billion dollars at the box office to experience their world.
But even then, unlike Neytiri and the Na'vi, Alita is actually intended to be almost human - is she human enough? We'll see what the audience decides on the 14th.
- Sid
* There are some odd changes from the Japanese language version to
the Viz release: the city of Salem becomes Tiphares, Junk Iron City
changes to the Junkyard, and Gally is reborn as Alita. The movie
version obviously kept her new name, but I don't know where the rest of
the proper nouns ended up.
** Digital Grand Moff Tarkin was a bit more positively received - it's a fine line.
