Earth is peaceful following the Tournament of Power. Realizing that the universes still hold many more strong people yet to see, Goku spends all his days training to reach even greater heights. The...
My dad is a big geek, he collects the comics from his childhood, Marvel mostly. He grew up in post-war Britain, where the colour and fantasy of the Fantastic Four and the Hulk was an escape from the bleak frugality of life in a northern town. His mother didn’t understand, and on more than one occasion threw away his burgeoning collection, including Spider Man number 1 (the eventual value of which he would spare her from knowing). As a result, I think I was always destined to foster similar interests, and while Marvel has become the behemoth of the 21st century, it never quite stuck for me. Nor did Star Wars, the other mainstream contender for kids attentions and parent’s wallets.
In the early 90s, cartoons were pretty wild. The success of TMNT spawned a host of psychedelic action cartoons featuring gangs of outlandish anthropomorphic characters. Biker Mice From Mars cast a set of three manly mice, with motorbikes, from Mars against a big fat businessman looking fellow who (from memory) could become a lizard. Oh yes, and one of the mice had an eyepatch.
What a time to grow up. Of course, this trend would eventually be replaced with action cartoons from a far away land. When Pokemon hit, it just made sense. I wanted to be a part of that world, and I actually could be with my Gameboy ever in my bedside drawer like a Gideon Bible. Of course I wanted to be the very best, the aggressive marketing ensured it. Nintendo became my Marvel, my Star Wars, my Manchester United. It was the company that gave me a reverence for Japanese media. Shigeru Miyamoto and Satoshi Tajiri were my Stan Lee and Frank Kirby.
Then there was Dragonball Z from Akira Toriyama. As a 30 year old man, it is the one franchise from my childhood which I haven’t grown away from. I remember the first time I caught it on Cartoon Network. This kid had just transformed into a giant, barbaric ape and was blasting mountains with beams of light from his mouth against a wild, moonlit scene. The green man in attendance, grim and deadpan, was forced to destroy the moon in order to calm this creature down. It was revelatory.
DB is positioned a little differently to Pokemon or TMNT, originating in Shonen Jump, it wasn’t designed to be viewed by US kids at prime time. And while it was highly edited for Western TV, it still retained its brutality, ruthless antagonists and the deaths of numerous main characters. DB’s continued appeal to fans from the 90s was reflected in the audience at last night’s screening of Dragonball Super Broly in Vue Piccadilly. Primarily male, mid to late twenties, and when the guy in front briefly checked his phone to see it was on silent, his wallpaper background was a screenshot of a Great Ape. It’s the loyalty and investment of the fans which has led to this film even being shown in a cinema. I wouldn’t have imagined this when I was 12 and you couldn’t find a Goku action figure to save your life. It honestly felt pretty cool to be at the movies to watch the latest Dragonball offering from Toei. If a slightly guilty pleasure.
So was it good? The previous offerings in the latest slew of DB media have been a mixed bag for me. Battle of Gods was special, as it hailed the return of DB from a long hiatus and introduced Beerus, the all-at-once universe threatening and laissez-faire cat destroyer God. Biker Mice From Mars eat your heart out. When Dragonball Super dropped I was a little bit heart-broken by the lacklustre animation, and the strange decision to retell BoG for the first ten or so episodes. This wasn’t the Akira Toriyama of the 80s, following creative whims and trying to outdo himself. This was Toei knowing they had a loyal and increasingly rich fanbase, desperate to feel like they did when they first saw Piccolo destroy the moon. Super picked up though, and while the tropes of Dragonball have been played out again and again, they managed to keep my attention through to the final episode. It wasn’t great, but it was Dragonball.
Broly was an experience. Director, Tatsuya Nagamine has breathed fresh life into the world of Dragonball. The first forty minutes, devoid of combat, have a wonderful ambience which evoked moments from Ghibli’s Nausicaa: Valley of Wind. King Vegeta’s voice echoes with consequence in the old Saiyan palace, the Saiyan elite like proud Viking warriors alongside him. In the town, the Saiyan people are given a dimensionality we have never seen before. They aren’t all hulking brutes – Bardock takes a merry stroll through his poor provincial town. I half expected a ‘Bonjour!’ (I suppose Frieza is Gaston in this metaphor). I knew we would have the retelling of the destruction of Planet Vegeta, and I expected to be yawning through it, after all we’ve seen over 9000 times (sorry). But we are given a lot here and the history of the Saiyans is expanded in some unexpected ways.
A major blessing is that Broly himself doesn’t feel shoehorned in (well maybe a bit). This isn’t the DB movies of the past, which were essentially TV specials. Broly, while a fan favourite, was never a part of the official timeline, but his inclusion now has been handled pretty well. Trapped since childhood on an isolated planet with his father, he is a naïve and wild boy (much like Goku) who happens to have seemingly unlimited fighting potential (much like Goku). This is quite fortunate as the story does demand a fighter that can go toe-to-toe with Goku and Vegeta. Yes, this is a trope of Dragonball, to quote Qui-Gon, ‘There’s always a bigger fish’. Except this time the catch of the day is pretty well drawn. It isn’t Frieza who just went off and trained for a few months. The scenario works, and the addition to the sometimes confusing timeline of DB didn’t raise my eyebrow.
The second act, the showdown, was weirdly less enjoyable than the first. Don’t get me wrong, the animation during the fighting was extraordinary. This is what we came to see. I honestly can’t think of a more rambunctious and explosive forty minutes in film history. This is the best Dragonball animation we have ever been blessed with. Fighting on the ‘snow continent’ was a great aesthetic choice, not only because Goku and Vegeta get to wear groovy coats, but because the way the snow and ice reacts to the movements is genuinely beautiful.
I tip my hat to the animators and to Nagamine, as after 30 years, it must be very challenging to come up with new ways to show that Goku’s punch is 1000 times more powerful, or to depict speeds and reactions which have been (since Goku was a child) faster than the naked eye can comprehend. There are always questions when it comes to these scenes. Piccolo destroyed the moon with a Special Beam Cannon when his power level was about 329, and Master Roshi had destroyed the moon before that when his power level was under 200. We’re dealing with ridiculous numbers now. I’m not going to go further into power levels here, as it’s a dead horse at this point in the DB community, but during the main fight (which literally sees the combatants briefly break reality, entering a psychedelic realm reminiscent of Ant Man going subatomic) Bulma is watching from behind a rock, no scratches or nothin’.
So why did the second act leave me a bit underwhelmed? Well, the first act was simply more compelling. The characterisation is rich, the world fresh and ripe for exploration. When we get to the big boss battle, we know what’s coming. This is the great strength of Dragonball Super Brolly, it made me care about the story again. The ending, while it won’t be spoiled here, gave me hope that the next series of Super (surely an inevitability) will take the franchise somewhere new, and if the anime can retain half of the quality of this film, it will be worth watching for years to come.
