This weekend, in the wake of the release of Netflix’s remake of Avatar: The Last Airbender, we asked you to name your favorite English-language take (that’s not just a dub) on an anime or manga. One fanbase certainly heard the call, with Alita: Battle Angel landing in first place with 61.9 percent of the vote. Now, full disclosure, I disliked the movie, but there’s no denying how much effort there was behind the project, and how much it embraces its source material’s weirdness; perhaps tellingly, because James Cameron owns the rights to all adaptations of the manga, it’ll also be the only screen iteration of it for the foreseeable future.
Similarly, in second place with 14.3 percent, was the Wachowskis’ 2008 film of Speed Racer. A critically panned, commercial flop on release, the film has become a cult favorite with the generation that grew up watching it – it remains the most kid-friendly film from the Wachowskis, who, incidentally, borrowed heavily from certain anime classics for what is still their most beloved project, The Matrix. In third place with 11.9 percent, we have Netflix’s well-received take on One Piece, which showrunners Matt Owens and Steven Maeda managed to please longtime fans and newcomers with; as a result, it became your second favorite live-action comic book series of 2023.
Thanks for voting, and special thanks to Mark Tweedale for reminding us we initially left out Drops of God from the options – clearly, we could all do with an Apple TV+ subscription. Check back this Friday for our next Reader Poll!
