Battle Angel ADV 60 minutes English/Japanese English Subtitles 12/07/1999

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I remember well watching this three years ago, and I remember well wondering why people decide that manga to anime translations are so easy, especially when they only get enough budget to do TWO episodes of something that's probably been running for years. While I do like robots and I do like giant rocket hammers, I don't particular care for Battle Angel enough to find it out. Maybe they wanted to make more, I don't know, I'm not a scientist... but the fact remains that if this was all they were going to put out then I don't know why they even bothered in the first place. Much like most manga to anime translations, this doesn't make a lot of sense. What we know is that the friendly doctor Ido has taken in the head of a cyborg named Gally and rebuilt her body. I'm not sure how the science of rebuilding a person from their still living head that you found in a trash dump works, and I don't particularly want to know either. Let me just tell you that the rebuilding of people from their heads happens TWICE in as many episodes. That's two times too many for me.

Doctor Ido and his new robot companion Gally live in Scrap Iron City, which is kind of like what Camden is to Philadelphia. Everyone from Scrap Iron City wants to live in the floating Zalem and nobody from Zalem wants to acknowledge that Scrap Iron City even exists, and they lock the windows on their Audis when they have to drive through to get to Princeton. Anyway, Doctor Ido was presumably exiled from Zalem though I don't believe we're explicitly told this. I'm sure if I had seen the manga I would know more in that regard, but since I have not I am an inferior person. What I DO know is that someone is going around eating punk girl brains like some sort of animated Return of the Living Dead and that is not my kind of thing. This is where we find out how the benevolent Doctor Ido gets the funds to go around rebuilding cyborg women all willy-nilly, he's a Hunter-Warrior. The Hunter-Warrior's job is generally to go around and kill brain eating cyborgs, that's basically true as far as I can figure. After saving her benefactor from those cruel brain eaters with a few moves that look like they were ripped straight out of Guilty Gear X (damn those Japanese and their time machines) , Gally decides she wants in on the action.

Then there's like a whole bunch of time when absolutely nothing happens and then the brain eating robot comes back after being fixed up by the sometimes evil but sometimes not Doctor Chiren. The doctor is pictured here in the ultra-sultry "I want to go up to Zalem again so I'm gonna let this black guy who looks like Morpheus from The Matrix feel up my turtleneck while I look out the window" pose. I hate to spoil it for you, but in the second episode she gets harvested for organs. Chiren has this freaking crazy love-hate relationship with Ido where half the time she wants to kill him and half the time she wants to be best pals. This is my main problem with this show, they want to make you feel bad for all the badguys because they had some other motive in mind. Yugo, voiced by the 'lovable' Spike Spencer, is going around killing people and stealing their spines so he can make enough money to go up to Zalem. Then when he dies trying to climb up a pipe to the city or something I'm supposed to cry? Pardon my French, but fuck that. You're ruining people's lives, you get what you deserve.

What I do like is that Battle Angel introduces little things in the first episode that are like tiny seeds that blossom during the second. The problem is that this is about the only thing I like about this show. One or two fight scenes are alright, the rest of them involve about five minutes of screaming and running around, which approaches dangerous precedents set by shows such as Dragonball Z. In case you're a bit denser than I assumed, it's really not a good thing. Plus I just refuse to synch with the idea that a girl who looks like she's twelve can be a super powered killing machine, that's annoying. Battle Angel had about everything I like, bounty hunters, robots getting killed, but I still just can't stand it. The morals this show suggests are pretty despicable, even to me and I hate the idea that I can't understand what's going on without reading a bunch of comic books too. I own three books of manga and already that's already way too much for me. No thank you Battle Angel, I can get my kicks plenty easy with or without giant rocket hammers.