There’s nothing ever wrong with expanding a roster of characters or expanding the realm of a particular universe. This kind of world building goes back decades and not just at the start of Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe. The way it is done though should be gradual and over time. Having new characters inserted into a story with no particular background or context is usually a bad idea. For the Dragon Ball Z world, Akira Toriyama did a fairly decent job of doing this kind of foundation laying so that there was a real solid base behind the story being told. However, that doesn’t mean it was always on point. A good example of this is this feature film entry. Out of all other entries to be released, this one perhaps has the most disappointing of stories.
The plot to this entry is about Mr. Satan (Chris Rager), the supposed world champ holding another fighter tournament where whoever wins will go up against him. Little does the man know that Goku’s son Gohan (Stephanie Nadolny) and friends consisting of Krillin (Sonny Strait), Trunks (Eric Vale) and Tien (John Burgmeier) have all entered too. Midway through the tournament, the Z fighters are interrupted by Bojack (Bob Carter) and his goons looking to destroy earth. Why? Because apparently King Kai (Sean Schemmel) and the other Kais had banished this villain long ago. The only reason why Bojack has returned is due to Goku (Schemmel) blowing up King Kai’s planet, which is what kept Bojack locked away. Convenience! That is literally why this film exists and for no other reason.
The writer behind the screenplay was again Takao Koyama, the same for all previous film entries. Yoshihiro Ueda served as the director to this feature who surprisingly headed the History of Trunks film which was much better. What doesn’t work here is the blatant blank slate backstory used to explain who Bojack is. Unlike Dead Zone (1989) or many other stories, the villains there at least got some kind of visual throwback to their run-in with the protagonist who knows them. Instead viewers will just get an exposition dump from King Kai with no further explanation to anything else. The character of Bojack is the laziest form of “new villain, insert here” writing. But this isn’t the most surprising aspect of this feature. It’s actually one thing that has been pointed out for almost every other entry.
Believe it or not, the writing decides to acknowledge the TV shows continuity. Why now of all times? It never seemed to matter before, but now the movie’s acknowledging timelines? This time, the characters properly refer to events like the end of the Cell games and all relevant characters are properly available? Shocker! When it comes to lineup of between the shows seasons it seems to work well as a one off story that happened in between major events. So this proves it can be done, but for whatever reason this is not preferred. The voice acting to this feature is always good to hear though with the funimation voice cast. For Bob Carter, this was his first time working a major film villain role and he sounds good. Although Bojack is not a well-developed character, his voice sounds cool.
The action and animation work well together. Having Tadayoshi Yamamuro as the animation director helped, seeing that they’ve helped animate the franchise going years back to the beginning. Much of the movements are fluid and the character designs are much more detailed. The action is also well mixed. The music for this entry was a little better but still not by a long shot. Returning to compose the new film score to this feature was Mark Menza. The tracks heard throughout work better than just random dated hard metal band music tracks, but nothing will beat the original score from Shunsuke Kikuchi. Much of Menza’s score sounds anonymous with no real signature. It’s weird because Mark Menza isn’t even credited on imdb but is in the film version release that he worked on.
Aside from the standard top notch voice acting, animation and surprisingly accurate continuity this entry is average. There’s no plot and there’s no development for Bojack as a stock rando villain. The US musical score still doesn’t come close to the JP original music either, despite not including outdated tracks.
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