The movie is based on a manga by Yukito Kishiro, which is generally seen as one of the better manga's out there.
For the unknowing: A manga is essentially a comic, japan-style. Most of the drawing is in black and white, quite in contrast to the western style comics. The drawing style however is a lot more realistic, save for the faces, than western comics. The faces are caricatures of how they would really look, but, this makes that feelings are conveyed a lot better than any western comic ever can. As it is stated in a Gunnm (or Battle Angel Alita outside of Japan) review, you can see in an instant how Alita is feeling, and the same goes for a lot of other characters.
Here comes the difference between a manga and an anime: Manga is Japanese style comic, Anime is Japanese style animation (mind you, NOT cartoon!). The difference is often forgotten, but should be pointed out.
Anyway, back to the anime: Gunnm is a 60 minute adaptation of the first 2 graphic novels of the comic. The movie is roughly divided in half, although the story flows through entirely. I can say beforehand: the movie is a very WEAK adaptation of the books. Nothing more, nothing less. It has been westernized too much. The character Chiren doesn't even appear in the books, and the big guy Alita defeats twice has an entirely different role (and not for the better).
The movie has been westernized to much in the sense that is has been simplified. Add a character tehre, make it quasi a double love story, add some fights and you're done. The entire path of discovery of Alita is left out (her fighting style, the Panzer Kunst, is essential to what thrives her to live on and discover where she's from, but the concept is entirely left out of the movie).
On itself, you can call the movie okay, but when you've read the books, it simply doesn't reach the level of the latter.
All in all, the animation is good, even very good. In terms of visual quality it ranks up right next to Ghost in the Shell in my books, while not being as realistic and dark, the fluent movement is very good while still remaining in the spirit of anime (watch the documentary on the Animatrix DVD to know what i mean with that).
The English voices are very much out of place, they are way too excited for the situations they're in, as if they were doing voices for any pokemon movie. That's what really brings down the movie, please try and watch it in Japanese with English subtitles if possible. English just doesn't cut it, but that goes for virtually every anime every dubbed in English.
To sum it up: This movie is a good 1 hour watch, and some may even want to watch it more. However, there's a lot of things that bring the movie down, especially when you;ve read the manga first.
If you watched this movie, buy the manga (starting with the first one of course, there are 14 translated graphic novels as of today) and read it, you'll be hooked. If you do it the other way around you'll only be disappointed.
