Dragon Ball Super: Broly – Doragon bôru chô: Burorî (2018)

Directed by: Tatsuya Nagamine | 100 minutes | animation, action | Original voice cast: Masako Nozawa, Aya Hisakawa, Ryô Horikawa, Toshio Furukawa, Takeshi Kusao, Ryûsei Nakao, Kôichi Yamadera, Masakazu Morita, Ryûzaburô Ôtomo

The immensely popular Dragon Ball franchise has been around for 35 years now. The series started as a manga in 1984 and soon became an anime in 1986. The story of Akira Toriyama is about a cheerful, haggard boy with a monkey tail (Goku) who, together with a vain young woman (Bulma), goes in search of the so-called dragon ball. These dragon balls are hidden all over the world, and whoever finds all seven balls gets to make a wish. In the beginning, the story relies heavily on jokes and jokes, sometimes with a slightly sexist slant. Especially Bulma, whose name means panties, has to suffer.

Gradually, the emphasis is increasingly placed on the battles Goku has to fight with all kinds of fantastic figures who often become friends after being defeated. And in the beginning, those opponents often still have obstacles that need to be overcome to find the dragon balls, later on they are also intergalactic bad guys who visit Earth just to have a good fight. It seems as if the Dragon Ball universe is a big dojo where fighters do nothing more than demonstratively compete with each other for the honour.

Characteristic are the epic battles that last many episodes and where every time one of the sides seems defeated, the hero or villain manages to tap into a new energy source that not only completely turns the possible outcome of the fight upside down , but also gives the character a different appearance (or just color). This soap-like structure with its perpetual cliffhangers partly explains, in addition to the fanciful storylines and sympathetic humor, the addictive effect that Dragon Ball has on its fans.

The original television series (and manga) ended in the mid-1990s and was then followed by two more series, the last of which (“Dragon Ball super”) ended in 2018. Dragon Ball also showed itself in (mainly Japanese) cinemas; the film ‘Dragon Ball Super: Broly’ (2018) is the most recent of the more than twenty feature films that have appeared since the 1980s. This part revolves around the character Broly, who seems to appear here for the first time, but in reality has been seen several times. After a nice elaboration on how the character Broly became who he is – namely an unpolished and extremely powerful fighting machine coming from the same space spawn that hero Goku comes from – the second part of the film is an attempt to recreate all the previous epic battles from the series visually. Think of a psychedelic explosion of shapes, colors and sounds with a hallucinatory and paralyzing effect.

Unfortunately, the story of ‘Dragon Ball Super: Broly’ doesn’t rise above that of a typical TV episode and it is only good to follow and appreciate if you are already a little familiar with the series, because even the battle scenes require some prior knowledge ( in this case about power levels and associated colored hairstyles). On the other hand, loyal fans, now middle aged, and a new generation of viewers can indulge themselves in the excellently animated and visually overwhelming brawls.