It's fair to say that not everything has gone to plan with this review series, which is one reason why we're up to a hundred and one goddamn posts and counting. But it's also fair to say that nothing has gone quite so horribly wrong as with this post. And it's all the fault of Dragon Ball Z! Because, you see, the one unbreakable rule around these parts is that posts consist of four reviews apiece, and there are fifteen Dragon Ball Z films if you count the two OVA movies, and fifteen isn't divisible by four, meaning that the obvious options would be to either wrap up my trawl through Dragon Ball Z with a three film post or to skip the last entry and the TV specials.
It's an insoluble problem of the sort I'm sure has ended weaker blog series, and probably even taken down an empire or two, but here's the thing: I suspect the solution I've come up with might be even worse. Still, I've committed to it now, so follow my logic ... Dragon Ball was created by Akira Toriyama, and prior to that, Toriyama was the man behind the super-successful-but-not-Dragon-Ball-successful series Dr. Slump, and there have been precisely five Dr. Slump films released outside Japan and - oh yeah, you've got it! - five plus fifteen is twenty, and twenty is divisible by four.
Which is a long way of saying, welcome both to the end of our intermittent Dragon Ball Z marathon and also the start of our Dr. Slump marathon, and I sincerely hope that nothing like this ever happens again. But since it has, let's make the best of it and take a look at Dragon Ball Z: Wrath of the Dragon, Dragon Ball Z: Bardock the Father of Goku, Dragon Ball Z: The History of Trunks and Dr Slump: Hello! Wonder Land...
First up, I was very much hoping that this would be the Dragon Ball Z film in which long-suffering deus ex machina Shenron the wish-granting dragon would finally snap and vent its pent-up rage on our heroes for abusing its powers so many, many times, so there's a point immediately lost for the misleading title. (Honestly, I've no idea where it comes from, except that there's a final attack that's kind of dragon-y.) Second up, I know I've ragged on these Dragon Ball films plenty for having basically the same plot enough times that it's become faintly obscene, so hats off to Wrath of the Dragon for shaking things up, in so much as any degree of shaking is possible for this franchise. Which is to say that everything still ends with an enormous fight, but the enemy this time around is a bit different and the road by which we arrive at that confrontation feels distinct from anything we've had before.
In a nutshell, the gang come across an enormously dodgy-seeming old man who convinces them that if they can just open the mysterious music box he gives them, a mystical hero will appear. Since they like heroes and presumably have nothing better to do - and are all too dim to realise how tremendously off this all is - they enlist the help of poor Shenron, whose number they presumably have on speed-dial by this point, and who takes this latest demand on its time with the usual dignity. And somewhat surprisingly, once they crack the magic box, it does contain a hero, albeit one who isn't the least bit happy about being rescued, for reasons that will occupy most of the movie's middle section.
Here's the problem with all that: there are no stakes. I mean, there's some vague mumbling about a universe-ending cataclysm, and very many people die in the inevitable scrap that takes up the last quarter hour - though, even there, hilariously, the point's made that good old Shenron will have them back to life in no time at all, because clearly godlike wish-granting dragons have nothing better to do except sort out your damn messes, Goku. But introducing a new protagonist, setting out their conflicts and backstory, and doing all the required worldbuilding for any of that to work is a lot to ask of a film of less than an hour, and while Wrath of the Dragon does a fairly good job all told, nothing can keep this from feeling terribly inconsequential. The nature of the crisis is both totally self-inflicted and largely unrelated to any of the series regulars, and more than ever, there's no meaningful effort made to convince us that our by this point preposterously swollen cast are likely to lose, let alone die.
All of which means that Wrath of the Dragon can't help but give the impression of being a side story that exists solely because Toei weren't about to let a whole six months go by without punting out another Dragon Ball movie. And that's unfortunate because, by most other metrics, this one's a commendable effort. Hashimoto wasn't a top-tier director by any means, but he does well enough at keeping the gears turning, and the animation is actually quite impressive: one shot in particular, an audacious fish-eyed first-person sequence, legitimately wowed me in a way Dragon Ball Z has rarely managed. So it's not like there's no reason to watch Wrath of the Dragon, and it even probably just about makes it into the upper tier of the series' many entries; I just can't imagine I'll still be thinking about it even slightly once I've finished writing this review.
Dragon Ball Z: Bardock the Father of Goku has two sizable narrative problems that it has no clue how to get around or perhaps doesn't even realise are problems. Which is a shame, because neither of them are insurmountable, it would just have taken some actual effort to, you know, surmount. And in fairness, it may be that in 1990 one of those issues might not have been quite so glaring as it is now, but anyway, let's stop dancing around it ... the fact is that a story about a largely unlikeable character with no real personality to redeem him, and one to which we already know the ending, or at any rate what the ending definitely won't involve, is a tough old sell.
So this first Dragon Ball Z TV special is a prologue doing precisely what its title suggests, in that it introduces us to Bardock, Goku's dad. Since we know Goku was found on Earth as a baby, there's no reason to expect a heart-warming tale of parental bonding, and sure enough, the two are never so much as in the same room together, which you might expect to be problem three, except that one thing the makers do manage to get right is sketching in something of a relationship for the pair, so credit to them for that, even if the way they've pulled it off involves an exceedingly dubious contrivance that's necessary to get the plot moving in any sort of direction at all. Essentially, we begin with Bardock and his fellow Sayans working in service to the evil despot Freeza, and Bardock has no problem with this until an alien curses him with the ability to see the future, or at any rate very specific parts of the future that relate to the awful fate awaiting him and his fellow Sayans. Oh, and also random clips from the original Dragon Ball, since ... yeah, actually, I'm already thinking that calling what we have here a character relationship was too much of a stretch. But it's enough to get Bardock to acknowledge the son he's never previously wanted anything to do with, and that's narrowly sufficient to make this function as some sort of meaningful prequel.
Going back to my original point, there are undoubtedly ways the film could get around how little grounds we have to root for Bardock, a man who'd surely have merrily kept on doing evil at the service of an intergalactic villain all the way to retirement age if the circumstances had allowed, but Bardock the Father of Goku deftly avoids almost all of them. It's only when Freeza's lieutenant convinces him that the Sayans are as much a threat as they are a useful tool that Bardock begins to think about rebelling, and his motives are never remotely noble. And while his drift toward something like the side of good isn't without a certain charm, it comes too late and too easily, and has nowhere to go except major problem number two, in that we can suppose with stone-cold certainty that the ending isn't going to involve Bardock executing his nemesis and saving the Sayan race from oblivion.
Given a narrative that spends its time dashing toward a brick wall and somehow still makes a mess of getting there, Bardock the Father of Goku could be worse than it is. If you've seen enough Dragon Ball Z to appreciate the broad significance of all this, it's kind of engaging to see these major historical events play out, and the animation is functional enough, with a bit of neat action right at the end where it most counts, and I dare say the sort of fans who come to these with their critical faculties turned way down would be far more excited to get to know Bardock than I was. Still, unless you fall into that category, I can't think of a single reason why you'd bother with this when there are so many better entries in this bloated franchise to pick from.
When it comes to The History of Trunks - and surely I can't be the only one who thinks that sounds like the title of a seedy documentary about swimming underwear? - it helps to have a proper idea of what you're in for. And I say this as someone who went in without the faintest clue; oh, I knew it was a TV special rather than a cinematic release, so my expectations were suitably muted, but I'm nowhere near up enough on Dragon Ball Z canon to appreciate that it was filling in a thus-far unscreened bit of background, in the shape of an alternate timeline adventure that the TV series made clear had to exist without giving any actual details of. Since it was stated that the character of Trunks had travelled back in time from an alternate future to heal Goku from an otherwise fatal condition, that necessarily meant that, if he hadn't, there'd have been a future in which Goku wasn't saved and things would have turned out very differently. And so they did, as we'll discover, in the shape of practically everyone in the Dragon Ball Z-verse biting the dust at the laser-spewing hands of evil synthetic human pair Android 17 and Android 18, leaving only Gohan and Trunks to pick up the slack.
A setup that wipes most of the major players off the board before we've caught our breath is an exciting change of pace for a series that tends to be so risk-averse. The problem is, screenwriter Hiroshi Toda doesn't seem to have thought this through half as much as he needed to, and more than once he gets tangled up in some inordinately stupid storytelling trying to keep his ducks in a row for Trunk's inevitable trip back through time. In one standout dumb moment, Gohan keeps Trunks out of a fight by the reasoning that he's three years away from being ready, though it's obvious Trunks is going to fight anyway, just on his own and with no hope of winning. Indeed, the whole business of navigating from young Trunks to less-young Trunks makes an almighty mess of any narrative logic, obliging leaps of years in which we're told characters have been fighting, training, or combinations of the two in ways that are almost impossible to reconcile with what we're actually seeing. Generally, the second you question any part of the plot, it crumbles. Why, for example, are people just going about their lives as normal with an existential threat on the loose? Why, with half the Earth's population dead, are theme parks still a thing? Sure, the villains are unbeatable, but people could at least try and hide from them instead of acting like everything's normal until the minute they turn up and decimate the entire city.
That, however, does get us to the one unassailable virtue The History of Trunks has to offer: its baddies are pretty marvellous. Or rather, its baddies are run of the mill by Dragon Ball Z standards as far as their designs and powers go, but their gleeful evilness and lack of any motivation besides a casually homicidal sense of fun is never not entertaining. They're basically two normal teenagers if normal teenagers had the power to kill anyone who irritated them even mildly, and that ends up being much more entertaining as a concept than it probably has any right to be. It even more or less makes up for the fact that Trunks himself isn't a remotely interesting protagonist, and for once, the one-sidedness of the various fights is a virtue, in that Android 17 and Android 18 are so hilariously bad-ass.
Those fights look pretty solid, too, as does most of a TV special that, visually, is barely below the level of the Dragon Ball Z films of the time - not the highest of bars to clear, it has to be said, but that this doesn't just look like television-quality animation is a pleasant surprise. Sad to say, though, that's about the only way in which The History of Trunks manages to exceed expectations or give a pretence of being more than it is. Get past the novelty of the setup and you find yourself with a tale that's broken in a bunch of crucial ways, the most significant being that it's forty-five minutes of setting up a conflict that won't be resolved and doesn't matter except to clear up questions it's hard to imagine anyone asking.
Dr. Slump: Hello! Wonder Land is - and I intend this, mind you, as a compliment - inordinately stupid. I mean, this is the sort of stupid you can't just chance your way into; this is some transcendental stupidity we're looking at right here. And unless you find silly humour an absolute turn off, that's enough to get it to some very, very funny places. Actually, given that I normally hate silly humour myself, maybe even that isn't much of an argument against.
What helps, I think, is that, prevalent though it is, the stupidity isn't all that's on offer. Hello! Wonder Land also has some actual ideas, and many of those ideas are fairly inspired. Take, for instance, the opening scene, in which a thinly veiled Superman knock-off argues with a thinly veiled Tarzan knock-off over who's the star of the film, before they both discover that in fact neither of them are and that instead we'll be spending the next half hour following Arale-Chan, pint-sized, super-strong, incredibly dim robotic assistant to the titular Dr. Slump, a sleazy inventor genius who's main goal here is to magically roofie the woman he has his heart set on. (Don't worry, he doesn't remotely succeed, and the precise manner of his failure is one of the best gags in the film.)
The universe in which this madness unfolds is so endlessly weird and inventive that, not for the first time, I find myself desperately sad that Akira Toriyama would end up being the Dragon Ball Z guy when he could have been knocking out divine lunacy like this. My favourite feature is the sentient technology that Slump cooks up, which somehow manages to do Cronenbergian technological body horror two years before Videodrome was even a thing and then, even more astonishingly, wrings laughs out of something so visually alarming that it makes your eyes want to crawl into the back of your skull. Actually, aside from the stupidity, this embracing of the strange and wrong is perhaps the main other source of humour in Hello! Wonder Land, and if anything that's even harder to get right.
None of this, it has to be said, is particularly technically accomplished. The animation is serviceable and often delightful, without doing a single thing that would make you dream this was a feature film; IMDB classes it as just another episode of the TV show, and while I'm inclined to believe Wikipedia and Discotek over them, you can easily see how someone would make the mistake. As far as the nuts and bolts go, the one aspect that truly shines is the vocal performances, which very much have the feel of actors who've inhabited these roles for so long that they've learned to pull off gags with razor-sharp precision, even when that gag is only spouting nonsense at high speed. I don't know exactly what I'd make of this if I'd watched it in isolation, but as the first entry in a five film marathon, it's an utter joy, and my only worry going forward is whether such ridiculous daftness can stretch to a longer running time without becoming completely exhausting.
-oOo-
