DRAGON BALL SUPER: SUPER HERO is everything I wanted from a new Dragon Ball anime in 2022. The series’s star rivals Son Goku and Vegeta are sidelined for the duration, allowing other members of the long-running franchise’s super-powered roster of martial arts defenders to shine: primarily, former would-be world conqueror and present day babysitter Piccolo and his ex-pupil, former world savior and present day harried scholar Son Gohan, whose three year old daughter Piccolo has spent an AWFUL lot of time looking after. The story concerns the revival of the long-beaten Bond villain-esque organization the Red Ribbon Army; its current leader, Magenta, has decided they need a trump card, and the man to craft it for them is Dr. Hedo, the grandson of long-dead Dr. Gero. Gero’s crowning abomination, the living biological weapon Cell, was obliterated by reluctant hero Gohan when he was just a boy in one of the series’s more spectacular climaxes and Magenta wants an improved version of the monster. But with Magenta having convinced Hedo that Goku and his friends constitute a rival organization seeking to rule the world, what the Red Ribbons first wind up with are the superheroic androids Gamma 1 & 2. Smart use of the series history, using the fact that, oh yeah, Piccolo WAS once a well-known supervillain to give these androids, who are programmed to think themselves champions of justice, a solid initial target; by the same token, the fact that Piccolo’s “the smart one” among our present-day protagonists means once he’s thought to be out of the picture, he’s able to sneak into the Red Ribbons’ compound and pull together a plan to take them down, hopefully for good this time. Probably incomprehensible to anyone not up on the series’s lore (or, at the very least, they won’t have the same level of investment), but for aficionados, a funny, exciting good time that does shamelessly play on our memories of Gohan and the rest’s battles with the Androids and Cell, but in such spectacular fashion that I really didn’t care. Tetsuro Kodama’s film (from a script by Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama) is the first Dragon Ball animation to be entirely 3D rendered, and in the early going it’s very IN YOUR FACE about it, opening a swooping and swaying view of the world from the eyes of one of Hedo’s insect drones — but as the film goes on it settles into a more typical groove stylistically; the action is furious and flashy, new powers cool and slickly designed. I think the only weak spot is the fake Hans Zimmer score; it works in the moment, but god, as I was waiting for the post-credit scene, the repetition of the core theme got a little obnoxious. Overall, though, I came away just thrilled to bits that 2022’s entry in the Dragon Ball anime franchise was a fun throwback to my favorite part of the Dragon Ball Z story starring probably my favorite franchise heroes that ALSO added some fun new bits to the ongoing universe.
