Why did James Cameron decide to give Alita big eyes?
In Alita: Battle Angel, why did James Cameron decide to give Alita big eyes?
Best Answer
They wanted her to be like manga.
James Cameron's words from Yahoo News:
“I think Robert and I were both always in utter agreement that she should look like the character in the manga,” Cameron told us. “With our first trailer that went out, we weren’t quite there yet. And we got a lot of blowback from the fans. And there was a backlash reaction at the studio. ‘Better make the eyes smaller.’ I said, ‘No, let’s make ’em bigger.’
“When we expanded her iris and her pupil, she seemed softer, more open, more inviting. You kind of saw through the window of her soul into her character. And then it worked.
Salazar (Maze Runner, Bird Box) provided a cold hard fun fact about how much work actually went into designing her character’s peepers.
“In one of Alita’s eyes, there’s more detail, more mathematics, more geometry, more pixels than in all of Gollum from The Lord of the Rings,” she said.
Also Robert Rodriguez's words from Kotaku:
“The manga anime eyes that we’ve seen since the 30s and Astro Boy has never been done photorealistically. So, usually when we see an anime translated, it doesn’t feel like that.”
Continuing, he adds, “The early artwork I saw that Jim [Cameron] had, before it was even technically possible, had that in her [Alita]. It was so striking and so arresting, I thought, ‘My god, we have to do that. We have to be the first to bring a true manga and anime character to life.’”
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Why did they give Alita big eyes?
For the team, it was important to get the eyes right because not only is that the first thing you see when you meet Alita, but they believed that was going to be one of the main things that helped sell the believability of the character to audiences.Are alitas eyes CGI?
Once we knew we could do that, we started working with them on the whole digitial process of creating what Alita would look like.\u201d \u201cA lot of people go, oh, that's Rosa\u2026and they just augmented her eyes,\u201d Rodriguez adds. \u201cNo! The character is completely computer-generated.How did they make Rosa Salazar look like Alita?
To do it, Salazar wore a motion capture suit, which is basically a black spandex suit with tiny little white dots all over it. The filmmakers placed cameras all around the set, to capture Salazar's movement from every single angle they were filming.Why was Edward Norton uncredited in Alita?
Robert Rodriguez directed Alita: Battle Angel, working from the script penned by writer and producer James Cameron. Cameron had originally wanted Edward Norton as part of Avatar, but the latter refused the role. Norton didn't want to play a part that celebrated the industrial complex.More answers regarding why did James Cameron decide to give Alita big eyes?
Answer 2
For those of you who haven't read the original manga, Alita is an early generation cyborg. This means that her design wasn't as flawless as newer generations (much like comparing today's computers to, say, a Macintosh 128k). It has little to do with 'manga eyes' or any generalization of the standard Japanese manga art style. In the manga, the size of her eyes (and shape of her lips - not accentuated in the movie adaptation) is a plot point. Most of the characters that cross her path comment on how strange her facial features are as, even compared to other big eyed manga characters, her eyes are quite large.
Being a fan of the original manga himself, it makes sense that Cameron would pay attention to this point in his adaptation and I am personally happy that he didn't back down and stayed true to the source content.
Sources: Stack Exchange - This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Exchange and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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