What We Said About Dragon Ball Super: Brolyįuminobu Hata gave Dragon Ball Super: Broly an 8.5/10 for IGN, writing that it "delivers in terms of awesome action, but more than that, it uses the fathers of Goku, Vegeta, and Broly to link back to the late-1980s and early-1990s heyday of the series to add a relatable and thoughtful subtext." Read the full review here.Īfter a somewhat labored setup recapping old grudges and establishing new threats, Super Hero surprises by how accessible it is to newcomers or viewers who haven’t checked in since Dragon Ball Z, especially as someone who has lost track of the new additions in Super Saiyan transformations. Hedo - via the manipulations of the Lex Luthor-esque Magenta - ends up aiding in the Red Ribbon Army’s corporate rebranding using superhero iconography, painting the Z fighters (Bulma included) as despotic alien invaders while Cell becomes a martyr. New characters continue old lineages, such as Dr Hedo, descendant of Gero (the creator of Androids 17 & 18 as well as Cell) and a young genius disliked by all, who dresses in spandex and idolizes superheroes. On that note, as well as those clear reference points, Kodama and Toriyama flaunt a strange interconnected web of lore that even connects to the video games Dragon Ball FighterZ and Kakarot. There are a lot of callbacks to a more classic era, more concerned with the events of the original series and Z, which subsequently makes it feel more open to those who had left the show in their youth while it continued on. In Super Hero’s revisitation of the character, it feels like the better kind of fan service, showing some thoughtfulness about the rich roster of personalities often left at the sidelines in latter-day Dragon Ball stories. The series eventually rolled things back to make Goku the protagonist again, and Gohan receded back to the show’s periphery, which in the long term feels like a shame, stalling a sense of forward momentum, and reducing conflicts to a matter of “when is Goku going to show up?” Gohan’s exit from the spotlight becomes part of the story, Piccolo’s words about how he’ll surpass Goku being thrown back in his face - the film comes off as something of an apology for leaving fan favorite characters in the dust, revisiting Piccolo and Gohan’s paternal relationship and the ways in which Gohan can be better than his father - as a parent and a partner, and as a fighter. Part of Super Hero’s approach of following up on these old arcs is how it essentially picks up where Gohan’s brief time in the spotlight left off, originally meant to inherit his father’s mantle as a defender of Earth, something cemented by his defeat of Cell.
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It’s a follow up to Broly as well as an older era of the series - more specifically, that of Dragon Ball’s Red Ribbon Army Saga and then Dragon Ball Z’s Android Saga ending with the Cell Games, which for a time felt like a genuine status quo shift to the series as a whole, putting Gohan in the center, before other plans got in the way.
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But, it also must be noted that even as Piccolo is clearly a big old softie (despite his sternness) as well as the better father, this is also a movie that begins with him kicking a 3-year-old into a rock (she’s fine).
It turns its action spectacle into a love letter to the bond between one-time villain Piccolo and his surrogate son Gohan – emphasizing that parental relationship to the point where Piccolo even forgets that when Gohan’s daughter Pan says “grandfather,” she means Goku and not him. Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero manages to succeed in a lot of the same ways, with a few differences and new tricks up its sleeve.ĭirected by Tetsuro Kodama (who also worked on the first Dragon Ball Super movie, Broly) and with the close involvement of series creator Akira Toriyama, where Broly had the emotional hook in the introduction of Broly as a tragic victim of patriarchal abuse, Super Hero is a more sentimental reunion of the series’ most stable father-son relationship. The recent Dragon Ball Super: Broly managed to answer all of this, delivering a new take on an old fan favorite character in a straightforward, white-knuckle brawler that at the same time took the series back to its paternalistic interests. A franchise as old as Dragon Ball - a series at this point (among others) synonymous with the proliferation of anime television in the West - comes with a lot of baggage, fan expectation, increasingly labyrinthine continuity, and perhaps diminishing returns on its best qualities.
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