by Cain Noble-Davies

Year:  2024

Director:  Aya Komaki, Yoshitaka Yashima

Rated:  PG

Release:  14 November 2024

Distributor: Sugoi Co

Running time: 83 minutes

Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth

Intro:
It’s been a hot minute since 2D and 3D animation have melded together this smoothly in one of these legacy anime works.

Even several months later, the facticity of Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama’s passing still hurts. Beyond the fact that he is the man responsible for one of anime’s essential works, and a major entry point for a lot of Western anime fans, he’d also been at something of a creative high point when he passed back in March of this year.

Toriyama’s more direct involvement in production, starting with Battle of Gods (in part a response to the almighty blunder of Dragonball: Evolution), led to a string of highly successful films, along with the Dragon Ball Super series keeping the flame alive on the small screen. Right up to the end, he also worked on this new series, providing the core story along with his trademark artistic input. The first three episodes show that the Toriyama touch is still in effect. Impressive, given the immediate hurdles it has to overcome.

Hurdle #1 is the first episode opening with the series’ new villain, the demon king Gomah, literally watching Dragon Ball Z to get up-to-date on things outside the Demon Realm. As a catch-up for the audience – bringing up aspects of the Majin and Buu sagas that are important for the story going forward – it makes sense, but it’s also clumsy as an in-universe fixture.

Hurdle #2 is likely to be much more contentious: The premise itself. The story setup, of Goku being de-aged back into a child and going on an intergalactic mission, is essentially the same as that of Dragon Ball GT, the most divisive branch of the franchise. While Toriyama lent character designs to GT, he mainly considered it to be tangential at best to his own contributions, and it has mainly been left to the wayside by both the franchise and its fanbase. As such, the decision to return to that well is concerning… at first.

By expanding that initial idea, so that basically every core character goes through their second childhood, it both sets aside worries that it will repeat GT’s sidelining of characters that aren’t Goku, and sets up that they’ll do something with this gimmick. The promise of more pissed-off chibi Vegeta is the kind of hook that can sell a series all on its own, and with its considerable callbacks to both the original and DBZ (right down to a moment of Fridge Lore about eating people that is both gross and strangely practical), it establishes a desire to make this into a healthy extension of the overall story.

The story here is interesting too, following young Goku, the also-young-again Supreme Kai, and the mysterious Glorio (which we dearly hope isn’t supposed to be a pun) as they traverse the Demon Realm to figure out how to fix their little issue. The world-building proffered in Episode 3 shows a lot of potential, with the Demon Realm as this tiered planetary system with its own social class structure and transportation by way of big space fish. The design for all this is classic Dragon Ball, and Toei don’t skimp on any of the detail, whether it’s the settings, the bobbleheaded characters, or the still-stellar fight scenes.

It’s been a hot minute since 2D and 3D animation have melded together this smoothly in one of these legacy anime works.

Between the average length for story arcs in the Dragon Ball franchise, and the typical length of any given shonen series, where hundreds of episodes can be seen as ‘just warming up’, it’s too early to tell just how good this entire season could end up being, but this opening salvo certainly piques interest. It fiddles with the series canon, both official and unofficial, in interesting ways; promises new territory for certain characters that could either strengthen the also-rans or continue to make the stars shine; and even with its emphasis on the older series for background info, it’s reasonably newbie-friendly. Here’s hoping that what comes next is just as fun.

7.5Good
score
7.5
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