Manga arrives on big screen with ‘Alita’

By NICK PERRY

Associated Press

WELLINGTON, New Zealand

The manga movie “Alita: Battle Angel” has been 20 years in the making, and producer Jon Landau thinks it will finally represent the breakthrough success in Hollywood for a genre which has proved problematic.

“I think this is definitely the breakthrough one because of the story that Kishiro wrote,” said Landau, referring to Japanese author Yukito Kishiro, who wrote the graphic novels, or manga, upon which the movie is based.

“You know, other mangas that have not worked have been very Asian-centric in their world, and in their stories,” Landau said. “And Kishiro wrote a melting-pot world. He didn’t write a central character that was Asian. He wrote universal themes of discovery, of self-awareness, for these characters. And that’s what’s relatable to people across the globe.”

The PG-13 film has an estimated budget of $200 million and when it opens Feb. 14, Twentieth Century Fox will be hoping for a much better reception than Paramount’s 2017 flop “Ghost in the Shell.”

That manga movie didn’t seem to connect with audiences, grossing just $41 million in the U.S. and $170 million worldwide, with some critics accusing it of “whitewashing” after Scarlett Johansson was cast in the lead role.

“Alita” tells the story of cyborg Alita (Rosa Salazar) who awakens without memory in a dystopic world where she’s taken in by a compassionate father figure Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz). As she learns to navigate her new world, she begins to discover her latent fighting powers and develops feelings for street-smart Hugo (Keean Johnson).

Landau said director James Cameron first fell in love with the Alita novels in 1999, and spent five years working on a script.

He brought in Robert Rodriguez as the director.

During principal filming in Austin, Texas, Salazar wore a motion-capture suit so her character could later be animated to reflect its look in the novels. When the first trailers came out last year, some viewers said Alita’s eyes appeared huge to the point of being creepy.

Senior visual effects supervisor Joe Letteri said they discussed the eyes with Cameron, and he had the opposite reaction, telling them they had held back and should go bigger.

“And it wasn’t the size of the eyes, it was the size of the pupils,” Letteri said. “Because that was a quality in the book, that sort of doll-like quality, and he thought we should bring that out more. And it worked.”

Salazar said she completed months of martial arts training for the fight sequences.