I suppose there are less logical ways to close out this busy year of vintage anime reviews than one last Dragon Ball Z post. Whether or not I like the series (and honestly, I'm not fully decided on that question) it's been a big part of my 2020 experience; actually, I hadn't realised just how much so until I checked and realised I've covered all the Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z films in the space of barely six months. Well, okay, not quite all; we have one more to go, but the only self-imposed rule I've set for these posts that I'm yet to break is keeping them down to four reviews apiece, and wouldn't you know it but there's no way to divide thirteen films by four.
This, of course, is deeply irritating to my OCD brain, and let's hope Wrath of the Dragon is something pretty damn special, since it's going to annoy me no end to have to bunch it in with three unrelated titles. But that's a stupid worry for another day, so in the meantime, let's take a look at films nine through twelve, those being Dragon Ball Z: Bojack Unbound, Dragon Ball Z: Broly - Second Coming, Dragon Ball Z: Bio-Broly, and Dragon Ball Z: Fusion Reborn...
A mere four months separated the arrival of the ninth Dragon Ball Z film Bojack Unbound from the release of the eighth, Broly the Legendary Super Saiyan, which I (checks notes) liked to a surprising degree. Four months isn't a long time between movies, but Bojack Unbound feels like a very different beast for much of its running time, and there's the sense that a lot's changed in the show. I mean, was Goku dead in the last one? (Checks notes harder.) No, it would appear that the main character of Dragon Ball Z was not, in fact, dead the last time we caught up with him.
In other film series, that might be important. Here, it's a minor blip that no-one much appears to care about, and certainly not Goku himself, who seems quite content goofing off and playing cards in the afterlife. In the meantime, his friends and family are all commiserating his untimely demise by entering into a fighting tournament, as you do. In fairness to them, there's a big cash price and the opportunity to confront the legendary hero Mr. Satan at the end of it, and surely it's what Goku would have wanted? Actually, we know it's what he'd want, since he gets to watch the contest on TV and cheer them on.
This is a fair summation of the level of ridiculousness Bojack Unbound is operating at, at least in its first half. The fighting contest is treated with almost zero seriousness, which is a tremendous relief from a franchise that tends to take its fighting very seriously indeed, and Mr. Satan is certainly not fearsome final boss material, since he spends most of his time freaking out over how utterly outmatched he is and trying to run away. And the combined results are fun of a sort we haven't seen around these parts in a fairly long while, and which generally gets relegated to comic interludes that don't particularly work. If, like me, you much preferred the trivial goofiness of the original Dragon Ball to the interminable battling to save the world of Dragon Ball Z, this is all quite a delight.
It can't last, of course. Every franchise has its rules, and in this case, the rules say the entire second half has to be a big old fight, so that's what we get. It's not among the series' best, it offers up one of the most disposable antagonists yet, and it's all the more frustrating for spoiling a film that up until that point had been so enjoyably silly. But it's also not horrible, and the animation is impressive enough to keep it on the right side of watchable. (Actually, Yoshihiro Ueda's directorial debut marks a notable shift to a cleaner, crisper style; it's not necessarily better, but it looks a good deal more modern.) What redeems the back half, and benefits the film greatly in general, is the lack of Goku. Nothing against the guy, but it's an unexpected pleasure to see the supporting cast thrust into the spotlight, and his absence makes everything seem that bit more inventive, even the parts that are otherwise deeply familiar. Altogether, this is the closest we've come to the Dragon Ball Z movie I've been dreaming of, the one with the courage to eschew the strangling formulaicness that's been present from the start, and while it's a shame that couldn't have gone further, it's enough to make for one of the more memorable entries.
In multiple ways, Broly - Second Coming feels like something of a soft reboot, or an attempt to nudge the franchise in a fresh direction. For a start, we have a new opening sequence and theme for, I believe, the first time since the series began, and for another start, the focus is squarely on a younger generation of the cast, with the grown-ups nowhere to be found. Our heroes this time are Goku's two sons Gohan and Goten, his fellow Saiyan's son Trunks, and Videl, the daughter of Mr. Satan, who I guess was a significant character in the series at this point, despite his lack of impact on the films? At any rate, the overall sense is partly of a bit of a general spit and polish and partly of a bid to go down a Dragon Ball Z: The Next Generation route, perhaps with the goal of roping in younger viewers.
So it's a weird choice on the face of it to resurrect a former villain, especially one who was so enormously boring, and especially in such a credibility-shattering fashion as Broly - Second Coming decides to go with. Broly, who we last saw, I don't know, dying in space or something, has apparently crash-landed on Earth, but he's been unconscious for years beneath a frozen lake because of reasons, and he's woken up now by Goten's whining over an empty stomach, which reminds him of how much he hated Goku when he was a new-born baby ... a new-born baby, presumably, with a really good memory and a really long vengeful streak. Anyway, that's more than enough for our favourite monosyllabic slab of meat to start attempting to murder our young heroes, and this being Dragon Ball Z, ample setup for a thirty minute fight scene.
Now, the rationale may have been that there was a certain inherent drama in pitting a bunch of kids against a foe their parents barely managed to beat, and certainly the idea of unleashing Broly - who, as much as I dislike the character, is at least pretty damn intimidating - against children would, you'd think, raise the stakes, if nothing else. However, that's not really what happens, since Broly - Second Coming refuses to take any of this too seriously. If we divide the Dragon Ball Z movies into two camps, those that have some semblance of a plot and those that are essentially just enormous scraps, then this is more the latter, except that the light-hearted goofiness and the limited narrative setup from the first half heavily inform the rest, with what gravity there is (and the obligatory "Oh no, our heroes are clearly all beaten, how will they possibly get out of this one?!" montage) relegated to the last ten minutes.
This, I think, is the right choice, and the one that just about elevates Broly - Second Coming into the franchise's upper tier. The comedy isn't especially funny, and it sure as hell isn't sophisticated, but with the hopelessly boring Broly as an antagonist, it makes for a satisfying contrast. You suspect that writer Takao Koyama was fully aware of Broly's dramatic limitations, and reducing him to the status of a shouty, explodey object that the plot proceeds to happen around is a wise move on his part. Indeed, as Dragon Ball Z gigantic fight climaxes go, this is one of the better ones, by virtue of having a fair few moving parts and a degree of narrative progression. Granted, it backs itself into a definite corner, with two obvious deus ex machina by which this wholly one-sided fight seems likely to end, and kudos to Broly - Second Coming, I suppose, for going with both of them. None of this makes it an exceptional movie, but it does make it a fun way to waste an hour, and a gentle attempt to do something novel with Dragon Ball Z's deeply inflexible formulas is definitely preferable than no attempt at all.
What a strange little nothing of a film Dragon Ball Z: Bio-Broly is! And that shouldn't come as a surprise, given that plenty of these have been brief, lightweight, trivial, or a combination of the three, but coming on the back of a run of movies that bucked the trend in one way or another, it's all the more noticeable that Bio-Broly just doesn't seem to have a lot of reason to exist. Why bring Broly back immediately and for a third time? Why bring him back as a slime-monster that has even less personality than his previous incarnation? Why anchor that to a non-story about one of Mr. Satan's old school rivals trying to take revenge on him, especially given how much that angle fizzles to nothing once the action starts? And from the perspective of someone who only knows these characters through the films, since when is Mr. Satan important enough to warrant such attention anyway? I guess what I'm saying is, what the hell was anyone thinking when they made this? I mean, other than, "Hey, you know what makes money, Dragon Ball Z films!"?
And look, it's not horrible, so don't let me give that impression. It's not even bad, really. It's certainly messy, and it cycles through at least four protagonists over the course of a forty-five minute running time, which is some decidedly untidy storytelling, but it's also par for the Dragon Ball Z course and thus not worth getting too wound up over. Plus, in among the film's carelessly slammed together three acts, all of which conform to totally different genres, we do end up with a final chapter that's kind of a neat disaster movie, which is something we haven't seen from the franchise in a while. In a series that's as obsessed with punching as this one, threats that can't be punched, like the absorbent slime that plays a big role in the climax, are good for wrinkling the formula in interesting ways, and I'm all in favour of interesting formula-wrinkling.
Really, though, this is awfully inconsequential, and seems to know it; was that why Broly was chucked in, to try and give a bit of unearned impact to a plot that would otherwise be so forgettable? Add to that what was a minor issue in the last entry but is far more noticeable here, the fact that the younger cast members that now appear to be the focus really aren't convincingly powerful enough to be dealing with these sorts of threats, and I almost find myself wishing for Goku back, novel though this lengthy absence of his has been. But what I'd really like is - and having looked at the running times of the two remaining movies, I fear this is optimistic! - a return to something more substantial-feeling, in the way Broly the Legendary Super Saiyan was. Or failing that, I'd take a film that doubles down on the wackiness and humour as Bojack Unbound did. But Bio-Broly offers up the worst of both worlds, albeit in a fairly harmless and inoffensive package, and surely no-one's crying out for that?
It's maddening to discover that we could have had eleven Dragon Ball Z films that were like Fusion Reborn, when what we've actually had was eleven films that were largely indistinguishable, with the odd special entry at least tweaking an overbearing formula in ingenious fashion. And arguably, what's so brilliant about this twelfth movie is that, though it feels radically different to anything that's come before, it doesn't get there by flinging out the formula but by assuming we know it by heart and using that instead as a launch pad to somewhere far less predictable. It has a first half that's mostly setup and a second half that's mostly a fight against a single, apparently unbeatable opponent, and it does both those things as well as any prior entry in the series, but for almost the first occasion, that's only a small part of what's on offer.
That we're in for something different is apparent from the beginning, which finds Goku in a fighting tournament in the afterlife, before rapidly shunting to another section of that selfsame afterlife, where the sort of clumsy mistake you might imagine would have happened at least once before in however many millennia this place has existed causes all the evil that's ever been to coalesce in the body of one teenaged oni. The resulting creature, Janemba, will be our major threat for the movie, but meanwhile, the subsequent disruption has brought the dead back to life, which leaves all our less deceased heroes with problems of their own. And while a brief fake-out leads us to suppose that means fighting the reincarnation of significant foe Frieza, what it actually amounts to is mostly Goten and Trunks battling Hitler and an army of Nazis for the purposes of comic relief. Because Fusion Reborn is that kind of a movie.
There's plenty of weirdness for weirdness' sake here, and the film embraces it wholeheartedly, down to the level of experimenting with the animation in ways I'd never have dared imagine Dragon Ball Z would indulge in: those Nazi-fighting scenes, for example, are presented in a whole different style of their own, one that looks as though the characters are cardboard cutouts stuck onto the backgrounds. But even when nothing that outright odd is going on, Fusion Reborn feels conscious of how goofy these designs are in a way none of the previous films have hinted at, and responds by dialling them up to eleven. It's not a great-looking movie exactly, and indeed there are occasional shots and elements toward the start that are pretty crummy, but there's something terrifically exciting about a Dragon Ball Z film that gets how bizarre this all is and runs with it. Really, that's the major success here, coupled with the aforementioned acceptance that, because we know inside out how these things function, that knowledge can be used to toy with our expectations.
Granted, it's not anything close to perfect, nor do I get the impression anyone wanted it to be. Were it not for the fact that at heart it's basically doing the same things all the previous movies have been doing, albeit in more imaginative ways and with a healthy dose of surrealism chucked in, the approach could easily have ended up a total mess. That aside, there are aspects that flat-out don't succeed; Shunsuke Kikuchi's score is pretty fine when it's being serious but obnoxious when it's aiming to emphasise the humour, and as noted above, experimenting with the animation occasionally just leaves it looking rough and unfinished. Nonetheless, in the grand scheme of a series that's been spectacularly awful at taking chances, Fusion Reborn is quite the revelation: a film that understands what in Dragon Ball Z works and understands equally that it's not cool to keep making the same movie over and over again, but that such a legacy is an unprecedented opportunity to mess with an audience in all sorts of engaging ways.
-oOo-
As hinted in the introduction, though I wouldn't claim to be a Dragon Ball Z convert, it's hard to ignore how many of these I've enjoyed quite a bit. My plan had been to tear through them for the sake of completism and then sell the box sets on, but that's been scuppered by how there's at least one film I really like in each. And this set has already produced two, so, however Wrath of the Dragon turns out, it's evidently a keeper: Bojack Unbound I'll probably return to eventually, and Fusion Reborn would be my series favourite were it not for the fact that, eight years later, Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods would be released, a movie so terrific that I'd cheerfully recommend it to even those like me who are ambivalent about this whole Dragon Ball Z business.
And, oh, hey, I just remembered that the TV specials exist and that I probably need to review them too at some point - and that even with those, I still don't have enough titles for another full post. Goddammit, Dragon Ball Z!
