The History of Battle Angel Alita

The manga and anime series Battle Angel Alita is a lasting influence in both the Japan and the US, and American director James Cameron is planning a CGI-based trilogy adapting the story.

Battle Angel Alita's heroine (called Alita in English, but Gally in the Japanese original) is a cyborg found, damaged and abandoned, in a junkyard by a kindly mechanic. Though he is able to rebuild her, he is not able to restore her memories. All she remembers is her skills in a brutal martial art of Panzer Kunst. Her fighting talents lead her to become a Hunter-Warrior, battling cyborg criminals as she roams the lethal city of Scrapyard seeking answers to her past.

Battle Angel Atila and the Damascus Blade

Alita's weapon, called the Damascus Blade, is as unusual as the woman herself. She obtains two of them when she takes up the deadly sport of motorball, but later has the master blacksmith Lam Dao forge them into a single blade said to be hard as diamond. The final Damascus Blade is not really a sword as we know it. It's an oversized version of the traditional butterfly knife, with a big clip-point blade concealed inside a wooden handle that Alita can snap open with blinding speed.

Anime Swords