EXCLUSIVE: Upon the release of that first teaser trailer for the upcoming spectacle film, Alita: Battle Angel, one thing that the majority of viewers walked away saying was something along the lines of, “Damn…those eyes.”

While anime is a medium that has long since portrayed their female characters with over-sized eyes, we’ve never actually seen a live-action adaptation that attempted to replicate that very look. With Alita, we were looking at a momentous first. Some viewers wondered why it was that Alita was the only one we saw in the trailer like that. Why is she special, or is she special at all?

LRM had a chance to speak with Alita: Battle Angel producer Jon Landau, and in our discussions, he opened up about the idea behind the eyes before going on to reveal the “why” behind it, as well as the fact that Alita will not be the only ones with those eyes.

“Right from the day we acquired the rights, we knew we were going to play her character with larger eyes. That was how [manga author Yukito Kishiro] conceived it… but for us the eyes were a design element that we wanted to put in there. In Alita’s world, while many of the characters we see in the movie don’t have large eyes, there are other characters that also do, it’s part of our story, that the URM — the United Republic of Mars, which Alita comes from — they have the larger eyes. The eyes are in the window into the soul, and we believe when people see the movie, that they will dive deeper into the soul of this character.”

Whether or not you agree with the creative direction from an uncanny valley perspective, it does add an extra bit of credibility to it all that it’s not just Alita with those eyes, but a group of people from URM.

What do you think of this new revelation? Let us know your thoughts down below! And keep an eye out for our full interview with producer Jon Landau, director Robert Rodriguez, and stars Rosa Salazar and Keean Johnson.

Alita: Battle Angel hits theaters on December 21, 2018.

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