OBSCURE O.V.A.S: *Battle Angel

Yukito Kishiro's original manga Gunnm ran for 9 volumes in the early 90's, followed by an even longer follow up titled Last Order, and now continuing in the Mars Chronicle manga, with some various prequels and spinoffs. The manga gained such international fame that it became the focus of James Cameron to do a live-action feature based on it, but since Cameron become more overwhelmed with hit Avatar saga, after a near two decades it was hand over to Robert Rodriguez to direct as the last official movie under the 20th Century Fox label. Prior to the American movie's inevitable release though, the manga first adapted into a 2-episode OVA in 1993 by Madhouse directed by animator Hiroshi Fukutomi which roughly covers the first two volumes of the series, which also acted as a blueprint to the American movie as it also recaps the same opening story arc. The OVA didn't go further than the two episodes because the original author wanted to focus more of his attention on his manga rather than an anime based on it.

Taking place in the future where a good portion of the Earth was decimated in world wars, one of the few remnants of civilization is the dystopian town of Scrap Iron City which lies directly below the floating utopia of Zalem that tosses their unwanted material down to the dingy city populated largely by cyborgs. An exiled Zalem citizen named Ido now works in the cityscape scrapyard as a cybernetics doctor who sometimes checks the huge piles of junk for salvageable robot parts. He happens to find the remains of an android girl that he takes back home and repairs to act as his surrogate daughter that he has named Gally. The young mechanical maiden later discovers that Ido is also a part time hunter-warrior which are volunteer bounty hunters that patrol the city for wanted fugitives. Gally decides to become a hunter-warrior too, partially to help her would-be boyfriend Yugo who secretly has been robbing innocent people of their spines so he can buy his way up to the Zalem. Gally has to confront the rowdy criminal Grewcica who was sent to kill her by Ido's former partner Chiren, a character original to the anime which was rewritten in the movie as being Ido's ex-wife. Gally learns that Yugo is now wanted for his crimes and watches as he is gutted down by a rival hunter-warrior, so our battle angel brings his remains to Ido who saves him by turning him into cyborg. The now mostly mechanized Yugo is later killed in an attempt to physically climb up to Zalem by a giant ring of spinning spikes. The OVA ends with Gally and Ido mourning what was left of Yugo in a small, ballooned basket.

Madhouse really delivered in this production with their detailed character designs and fighting sequences. There is also a mind-bending amount of violence in this for a 90's anime, that was mostly tempered down for the movie adaptation. Most Americans might have trouble accepting the fact that the translated version of the title character is Gally instead of Alita which was the name used in the original manga English release by Viz Manga. The American version of the OVA was available on dubbed VHS and DVD with a completely separate dub made for the European market by Manga Entertainment. Both of these releases were put on ice after James Cameron got the rights to the movie which also gave him authority on its anime adaptation, even though the OVA has been out of print for decades now with nothing available for streaming. It's unknown if the anime will finally get a re-release or even put on Blu-Ray, so you might need to hold your breath if you want to see a licensed edition of this cyberpunk classic.