Moving Pictures: Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero Reignited My Love of the Franchise

I made it through over 100 episodes of Dragon Ball Super back in 2020, but I dropped off of it in favour of other shows. Recently, I decided to knuckle down and finish off the final 20-something that I had left, as it’s on Crunchyroll. While the Tournament Of Power arc ran on and on (and on and on and on), I found myself getting frustrated that I still had X amount of episodes left to watch.

It didn’t help that every one was set over the course of a single minute of the tournament. Padding out the run time were frequent cuts to the audience (those who had been knocked out of the tournament), who would describe what we had just seen happen. They would also gasp in shock as a character powered up, explaining that this was the strongest power level that they had ever felt! Usually once per episode. Sometimes twice.

We GET IT already!

By the time the somewhat predictable ending finally rolled its credits, I was starting to feel burnt out by it all. Oh, a character broke through their own limits? For the tenth time in this one story arc? You’re kidding!

Anyway, since there were only two movies left of the Super saga, I decided to just watch them and be done with it. Dragon Ball Super: Broly reimagined the 1990 movies starring the Legendary Super Saiyan, which were non-canon, and it was just Saiyans screaming while trying to reach even greater power levels… again.

I knew that the final movie, Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero, was animated fully in CGI. Not the “anime style done with computers” type, but “videogame cutscene” style. Say what you want about it, but it’s a huge difference to how the rest of the shows and movies have looked.

But, then I actually watched Super Hero, and it was like a Senzu Bean, restoring me after the harshness of the past days of brutal punishment that was Super.

Not not me watching Super Hero

The plot focuses on characters who aren’t Goku, and while he’s certainly in the movie, it’s only for a short time, just so that we know that this takes place after the in-canon Broly. The Tournament of Power arc introduced over 50 characters, and gave literally no time to existing side characters, while Broly focused mainly on the few new ones that it introduced. Super Hero did introduce new characters, and did a thing that I’m usually not a fan of — they are previously unknown relations to existing ones! However, the way that it’s done works in my opinion.

In a nutshell, the Red Ribbon Army is reorganising, and they get Doctor Gero’s grandson to build them some androids. With Goku and Vegeta off-planet, it’s up to Piccolo, Bulma, and Gohan to put a stop to their plans. Of course, characters power up to never-before-seen levels, but at least it’s not the ones who could already destroy the Sun with their weakest punch.

It was thanks to Super Hero that I realised it wasn’t the fighting that I wasn’t enjoying. That’d honestly be a little silly, I’m watching a shōnen anime, of course it’s a lot of fighting. What I had been missing was a fun story! Broly was serious with a couple of humorous bits. This one was humorous with a couple of serious bits!

The animation is another highlight, as it feels like the production house could do more with it. It wasn’t just blurs of shapes and zoomed-out shots of action “too fast to see”, no, these were well-choreographed, and multiple people didn’t need to be constantly punched through mountains!

The best thing Super Hero did was recontextualising things as far as the average citizen is concerned. A company claims that it just happened to invent a way to fit vehicles and entire buildings inside capsules? Nah, clearly working with aliens which they can prove exist.

Look, I just really enjoyed Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero and recommend it highly. Unlike the Dragon Ball Z movies, it doesn’t exist in a relative vacuum, so you lose some context if you haven’t seen Super and Broly first, but you can watch those later if you really need to. For that matter, since it features the Red Ribbon Army, it also pretty much relies on you being familiar with Dragon Ball, too. But never mind that, you find out what Piccolo’s house looks like! Maybe I’ll actually watch Dragon Ball DAIMA after all, once the dub is available in the United Kingdom…

He has a house!