The animation is brilliant (one of the best I've ever seen), sure. There's exciting action as Gally with her cyborg skills, take apart the vermin of Scrap Iron City. The world that the author constructed is intricate and complete. But this anime is about Dreams. Whether it be abandoning everything to rise up to a heaven (which is Zalem in this story) or the dream of staying with someone and starting a New Life in an Old World. And of course, with any story about dreams comes Sadness. And they hit it perfectly without ever once going into melodrama.

This OVA is in two parts. The first one is for the action buff, with sequences that match those of Ghost in the Shell and sets up the more deeper emotional conflicts ahead. The second part is pure visual poetry — whether it be keeping a close one alive with your own life support system; and the dirtiness of the world the "real" people live in, or being saved to become a female "doll" (which in Japan often also means "robot"). How do you create a story that shows that sometimes it takes courage to give up a dream even when we admire the character for holding on to it for so long?

Cloaked as a scifi series about bounty hunters of the future, Battle Angel is really an allegory for the dark underside of the class system in a capitalist society. Gally (Alita in the manga) is introduced as a discarded cyborg torso on the junk heap below the sky city of Zalem, found by the hunter warrior Ido, himself a former Zalem resident. While Gally and Ido's Zalem pasts are never explored in these 2 episodes (and they should have been), it's the desire to return there, to live among the elite, that drives the plot forward. Whereas Ido and Gally seem resigned to their place below Zalem, Gally's love interest Yugo dreams of buying his way into the sky city above - and he's willing to perform any number of illegal activities to do it. Gally's purpose becomes to help Yugo win his dream, even if it means putting herself in conflict with her existence as a hunter warrior, and even though we learn it may be an impossible dream. It's a pretty sad commentary on the class system we all live in.