Once Akira Toriyama’s Dragonball Z franchise came to an end, so did the usual features that came out regularly as well. Starting in 1986, the two shows were a long running staple in Japanese culture by that point and quite popular to boot. However, seeing that it ended around the ten year anniversary mark in 1996, it seemed appropriate that maybe one more feature should get made. The difference here is, unlike the other features before it which many have gone back and forth about how they fit into the shows continuity, this feature would actually harken back to the days of the original Dragonball features. To honor that decades long run, this feature decides to completely start from the beginning. That means literally starting from scratch. And this completely makes sense.
Since it is a feature film and not a TV episode, the plot is
condensed. The orphan Goku (Stephanie Nadolny) is discovered by Bulma (Tiffany
Vollmer) where he comes to understand the power behind the ever so sought
Dragonballs. There they set off to find the others while coming across other
well known characters like Yamcha (Chris Sabat), Oolong (Bradford Jackson),
Master Roshi and Android #8 (Mike McFarland) to end up colliding with the
infamous Red Ribbon Army who are also looking to collect all seven Dragonballs.
Serving as a retelling, the plot points or highlights cover various parts of
the show from season one to season five. The screenplay was written this time
by Aya Matsui who had worked on episodes of Dragonball Z. Directing this
feature goes to Shigeyasu Yamauchi who had also directed the last few
Dragonball Z films.
For story reasons, the screenplay serves its purpose by evenly covering and omitting sections of the episodes but not keeping things familiar. There are certain things maybe that didn’t need to be included like maybe having Oolong involved or maybe including Krillin but these are very minor issues. It’s obvious this presentation is mainly to give its audience nostalgia and not go through every single little thing that happened for all those seasons. There are sometimes where things feel a little rushed in terms of pacing but again this is what happens when a story that’s many seasons long is condensed into an hour long feature. This was the same for all the original Dragonball feature films. That doesn’t take away the quality of the overall product though.
The voice acting as usual is spot on here. Featuring all the original US dub voices that made the anime a classic in the states, there’s no one who sounds out of place here. Nadolny returns as kid Goku and performs with zero flaws. The same goes for Tiffany Volmer as Bulma, Mike McFarland for Master Roshi and Chris Sabat for Yamcha. There’s also voice appearances from Sonny Strait, Chris Rager and Kyle Hebert. Even Brice Armstrong as the original narrator to the show returns. The action is also very entertaining as well, and perhaps more than the previous Dragonball Z films. Mainly because it goes back to the concept of adventure and martial arts. Not so much who has the higher power level and transforms. Watching Goku use his power pole or Nimbus cloud is more fun than Super Saiyans always being used.
Visually, cinematography is credited here for Masaru
Sakanishi who also did the same for
Dragonball Z: Lord Slug (1991), but again, for what? To what purpose does
cinematography serve for a 2D cell animated movie if there’s no dimension or
layering to it? Other than that though the animation looks great and as a
pseudo reboot it makes sense to change the color palette like having Bulma’s
hair or Goku’s gear being a different color. Lastly, the musical score was
surprisingly composed by Akihito Tokunaga. The surprise is not so much that Shunsuke
Kikuchi wasn’t used here to compose but not using Nathan Johnson or any other
outdated way of adding music to the film. At least here, Tokunaga’s score
sounds very close in style to Kikuchi’s and it is a welcome sound.
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