dragon ball super superhero spoilers woo
I don’t remember if I mentioned that I’d bought a ticket to go see this or that a whole 2 days before it screened I managed to accidentally recruit a friend to come watch it with me, but hey I just got home from the cinema after watching Dragon Ball Super: Superhero! Dubbed! And it was pretty solid!
Definitely think choosing to strongly focus on Piccolo and Gohan was a great choice, it’s nice seeing other characters take a strong spotlight position again instead of just Goku and Vegeta as the stars of everything modern Dragon Ball is up to. Helps that I think Gohan and Piccolo each work very endearingly as lead characters. Piccolo doesn’t really have much of a character journey here, he’s mostly just there as a vehicle to experience the story, but he’s definitely a fun one for that and like hey he gets a new form, sure. Gohan does have some development here, and it’s well executed at that - although it is literally just him having to remember the importance of training so he can defend the earth - which is an arc he’s largely had before and which I’m expecting once again won’t really matter in future super content. They can once again just have him lose access to that new form he got (kinda don’t like its design btw, and it was disappointing that it only really saw a few minutes of usage anyway, also disappointing was that it was treated as a rage form and like, come on dude) through not training then just repeat that arc. But that’s cynical of me and not relevent to this movie, so for now I’m happy to say I like how Gohan was done here.
Side characters don’t really bear as much mention here. Goku and Vegeta are largely just training, Vegeta beats Goku in said training because sure, got it. Krillin is largely a laughing stock which is like, whatever. Pan is really cute and really fun and I enjoyed her screentime a lot. Surprisingly enough they make Goten and Trunks fail the fusion dance but then have Fat Gotenks still help out quite a lot in the fight, I actually really enjoyed that. They made Beerus develop a crush on Cheelai which, hey it’s a new Beerus joke I’ll take it. I don’t think I have anything else to comment on here.
Probs the stars in terms of having well-executed character arcs here were actually the villains, specifically the Androids Gamma 1 and 2. Their characterisation and arcs are truest to the Superhero title in the movie’s name, basically just dudes programmed to act like costume superheroes, but they’re doing evil shit right now because they’re misinformed, and then they manage to assess the situation, reevaluate what they’re doing, and then actually play heroes and shit. This also all happens during the fight by the way, which I really like - Dragon Ball movies can be prone to X minutes of plot before Y minutes of huge fight, but this one was way more of an actual mixture of both, which we like a lot.
Certainly have mixed feelings on the eventual main antagonist though. Cell Max. He’s not Cell - in terms of character he’s really just a giant screaming kaiju - but he’s designed to look like Cell. Thing is they give pretty much the best possible justification for this to be the case imaginable, he’s literally designed off of Cell because the Red Ribbon Army dudes saw how strong Cell was and still have Gero’s notes after all, and was then built by Gero’s grandson Dr Hedo since hey he’d be able to do what his granddad did easy. In-universe it’s really believable that he’d be a thing that existed. Where it gets easier for me to be negative is, he’s designed like Cell for nostalgia lol. Super loves redoing what it knows we liked before, so we get a villain that looks like Cell and is called Cell, because Gohan’s biggest moment was against Cell so now Gohan can fight Cell but again. The justification works and feels natural but it’s hard not to be upset by that meta of Super just kinda doing old stuff again. Also lowkey kinda wish he got like, a smaller form at the end, just because giant characters don’t make for as fun fight choreography.
Visuals of this movie were definitely a curious one. Early reactions obviously leaned negative because Dragon Ball found its best 2D anime style yet in Broly and then immediately for the next movie jumped to full 3D. And I don’t think the early trailers looked great. Come the final product though and honestly this looks super great lol, the fight in the rain especially. I can’t pretend I didn’t prefer how the 2D sequences in this very same movie looked - but the 3D fight animation was still very good and still felt very Dragon Ball in terms of choreography and spectacle and such. Flashy lights were very flashy.
Suppose all around like, yeah good time. It’s weird, in many ways it does feel like an improvement over, say, Battle of Gods and Broly - plot progressing during the fights instead of stopping just to have those fights, as well as obviously strong utilisation of the sidecast instead of just Goku and Vegeta exclusively - definitely on paper makes for a really good time. But at the same time I didn’t quite enjoy it as much as those movies. Weird. Oh well. 7/10, sure.
