Dear friend of Arkadia,

You are invited to Alita, a contemporary hero, by Eduardo Serradilla Sanchis on Wednesday 23.10 at 5pm at Arkadia (Nervanderinkatu 11)
Eduardo Serradilla Sanchis will present Alita, a cybernetic being, and discuss her importance in the modern word.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alita:_Battle_Angel

Welcome!

Warm regards,

Ian         
www.arkadiabookshop.fi
– Entrance is free but a donation of €3 (or more!) to fund the event is suggested and would be most welcome. If you have no loose change or coins we gladly accept payment via Visa Electron or Mastercard etc.!

ALITA, A CONTEMPORARY HERO

A blunder -apparently the merest chance- reveals an unsuspected world, and the individual is drawn into a relationship with forces that are not rightly understood. As Freud has shown, blunders are not the merest chance. They are ripples on the Surface of life, produced by unsuspected springs. And these may be very deep -as deep as the soul itself. The blunder may amount to the opening of a destiny, the “call to adventure”, “the awakening of the self”. But whether small or great, and no matter what the stage or grade of life, the call rings up the curtain, always, on a mystery of transfiguration -a rite, or momento, which, when complete, amounts to a dying and a birth.
For those who have not refused the call, the first encounter of the hero-journey is with a protective figure (often a little old cronen or old man) who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass.
Campbell, J. (1993). The hero with a thousand faces (2nd ed.). London: Fontana Press.

One way or another, Gally, the character created by Yukito Kishiro for the series Hyper Future Vision GUNNM, later published in English by VIZ Media which made it popular under the name Battle Angel Alita, conforms to the hero identity developed by Joseph Campbell in the book The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Alita, a cybernetic being which was thrown away by its creators after facing many battles threatening to destroy mankind, ends up in Daisuke Ido’s hands. This cybernetic expert will not only reconstruct the body of the young being but will teach her who she really is and why she was designed and built. Just as Joseph Campbell points out in his book, Daisuke Ido will become the mentor which will help young Alita to answer the hero call once she accepts her own place in the world. Added to that, he will provide the adventurer, i.e. Alita, with a new body as a protective amulet against the many threats she will find on her way.
The sum of all these elements will make Alita reborn to become a persistent, intelligent hero which does not shy away from sacrificing herself when needed, as extracted from the writings of the American anthropologist, the cornerstone of the contemporary hero concept, no matter the format in which it appears.

EDUARDO SERRADILLA SANCHIS
Biography

Eduardo Serradilla Sanchis (Canary Islands, Spain, 1966) undertook a joint honors degree in Advertising and Public Relations, landed a job as a broadcast journalist whilst studying and soon after graduating, another at the creative department of an advertising agency in Spain’s capital city, Madrid. All in all, as a public relations, he has organized more than one hundred and fifty exhibitions and cultural events in the Canary Islands, mainland Spain and Finland between 1989 to 2019.  
In 2005 he saw his first book published. “10 años de terror oriental” (Ediciones CineAsia), an in-depth study about horror films made in Japan, Korea and China during a 10 year time-span, was written in collaboration with seven other writers. Since then he has written six more monographs and five academic books, all published by Dolmen Editorial, about comic-book artist, graphic series and comic characters. His last book which is a long study of the Star Wars comic-book published, around the world, between 1977-1986 with the writer and editor José Gracia Pont, for his own editorial. He is frequently invited to speak at comic conventions, cultural event and seminars pertaining to his areas of expertise.
With more than a thousand articles about films, film premieres and festival, comics and graphic novels for Dolmen Editorial’s magazine, for the online newspaper www.eldiario.es/ canariasahora.es, for the sci-fi specialized web-page www.tumbaabierta.com and for the long gone La Opinion de Tenerife newspaper’s cultural supplement El Radikal, he has become an established cinema and comic journalist