Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero
Goku & Vegeta step off the stage to let others shine in this pleasant but superfluous side-story.
Dragon Ball is in a weird place.
That’s hardly an insight on my part; the action-anime behemoth has been in a weird place for a very long time. It’s seemingly one of very few media properties that has maintained such perennial popularity without significant effort put toward meaningfully expanding upon its mythos or characters (beyond its trademark power boosts and accompanying hairstyle changes). Somehow, Goku, Vegeta, and Piccolo — despite remaining mostly stagnant for almost 30 years — continue to generate enthusiasm from audiences worldwide.
Even as someone who considers himself a fan, it baffles me that the series has maintained its iconic status and media presence without mixing up its incredibly basic formula. The procedure has pretty much gone as such, without diversion, since – oh, I don’t know – 1994:
A new, scary villain arrives that no one can compete with.
Goku and Vegeta dig deep to find a new level of power.
Vegeta takes on the villain and gets his ass whooped.
Goku faces the villain and saves the world, with most everyone else playing the part of set-dressing.
Rinse any leftover messes with the Dragon Balls, and repeat.
Even the most recent film, 2018’s Dragon Ball Super: Broly — which is, by miles, the most accessible and narratively interesting the franchise has been in a long time, and does make some effort to shed the above formula — still features the typically lopsided share of spotlight between the iconic Saiyan duo and any other familiar faces.
That series constant, if nothing else, makes Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero (an unusually clunky name, even for an anime film) something of an oddity. This time around, Goku and Vegeta are all-but absent from the main story, training off-world with their new sparring partner, Broly—a pickup from the previous film.
Instead, we’re primarily following Piccolo, with a supporting turn from Gohan (biological son of Goku, surrogate son of Piccolo), and appearances from most of the rest of the “good guy” regulars. (I think at one point they were called the “Z Fighters?” Not sure if that team name is still intact, but I’ll stick with it.)
It’s a change of pace that — while not feeling incredibly important or meaningful to the big picture — offers a bit of reprieve from the same-old Saiyan-centric hierarchy. Effectively, Super Hero is a feature-length side-story, with all the expected pros and cons.
Since I’ve already spent seven paragraphs laying down franchise context, I’ll instant-transmission right to the point: I enjoyed Super Hero for the lightweight, silly, and well-animated action romp that it is. It may not inject new life into the franchise the way Broly did, but it will give loyal fans the gratifying sugar-rush of spending some quality time with characters they know and like.
Frankly, I think that may be all I can actively expect from Dragon Ball anymore. Sure, it’s nice when something like Broly comes along and manages to feel both fresh for veterans and accessible to newcomers, but I also understand that the franchise is essentially in its retirement era—still kicking, but mostly just here to have fun doing what its known for, rather than shaking things up.
That’s about the level Super Hero operates on. There are a few semi-interesting surprises, but it functions more like a non-canon special or a filler episode than a whole new chapter that pushes the series forward. Would I prefer that each new entry take an approach more like Broly? Absolutely. Is that unrealistic? Probably.
Super Hero begins by reminding us of a nefarious force from earlier sagas of Dragon Ball, The Red Ribbon Army. Having operated in the shadows for years, after multiple defeats at the hands of Goku and friends, the RRA has been developing a new breed of androids—robotic simulations of humanity with the capacity for incredible power that can rival and even outperform most of our heroes.
Magenta, the head of the RRA’s public-facing shell corporation Red Pharmaceuticals, recruits the scorned robotics genius Dr. Hedo — grandson of the late Dr. Gero, who created the RRA’s first androids — to help him take down the heroes who threaten his never-ending pursuit of power and wealth.
Meanwhile, Piccolo spends his days training and babysitting Pan, Gohan’s three-year-old daughter. These sequences are mostly frothy hijinks, with Piccolo awkwardly navigating a FaceTime call with Pan’s mother, Videl, via a cellphone in a kitty-cat case, and being tasked with picking up Pan from school. Stupid fun stuff that puts our main character in some unconventional situations.
Their frivolity aside, these bits of the movie also mark a rare occasion in which the series actually stops to explore the day-to-day lives of these demigod warriors and offer small insights into how they’re feeling. It’s a pleasant alternative to only seeing these characters when they show up on the battlefield to watch Goku save the day.
Piccolo becomes aware that the RRA is still in operation when a mysterious android, calling himself Gamma (actually #2 in a twin pair of Gammas) and dressing like a comic book superhero, shows up at his doorstep for a not-so-friendly test of strength. Piccolo manages to escape Gamma #2 and covertly pursue him back to RRA headquarters, where he disguises himself as a guard in order to learn what the shadow-corporation is up to.
(Important Note: tactical SWAT gear is one of the best looks Piccolo has served since the “POSTBOY” getup in Dragon Ball Z’s driving school episode. Keep putting Piccolo in silly human clothes, Toriyama.)
It’s here that Piccolo learns more about the RRA’s true intentions and the horrifying secret weapon they’re developing. With Goku and Vegeta too busy training off-planet to notice the phone ringing, Piccolo realizes he needs to find some recruits to quell the impending threat.
Piccolo ropes in several familiar faces, but he knows the real ticket would be Gohan —probably the most powerful being on Earth, at least in the absence of Goku and Vegeta. Unfortunately for Piccolo, Gohan has left his fighting days behind in favor of his professional and academic pursuits. Fortunately for Piccolo, however, the RRA already has a plan in the works to lure Gohan into a battle with the Gammas.
It’s also worth noting that a significant portion of the film’s first half is dedicated to Magenta and Dr. Hedo meeting and getting their plan underway to usurp the Z Fighters as the world’s heroes. These scenes are fine, I guess, but neither character is a particularly interesting foil to our protagonists, nor especially sympathetic in his own right. (Well, Dr. Hedo does eat a shit-ton of Oreos, which is pretty relatable.)
It is, however, somewhat refreshing that they aren’t mega-powerful fighters themselves — a rarity for Dragon Ball villains at this point — instead being puppeteers who are savvy enough to create circumstances in which they can pose a substantial threat to the Z Fighters. The movie doesn’t exactly do a whole lot with that, but like the rest of the film, it’s at least a cosmetic redressing of the usual structure.
That sounds like a lot of setup, and I guess it is. But for the most part, it’s sufficiently entertaining — perhaps predicated on the condition that you’re already familiar with and invested in most of these characters. That’s the biggest distinction to note between Super Hero and Broly: this one is 100% for the diehards, and makes little attempt to fill you in if you aren’t already onboard.
The latter half of the film is where most of the action is, and I’m sure this is what most fans of the series are wondering about.
And, y’know what? The fight scenes… pretty rad!
Many fans (myself included) were skeptical about this movie taking the step into fully computer-generated 3D-animation for the first time in the series. Rest assured; it’s really not bad, and beyond the initial uncanny-valley feeling of seeing familiar characters rendered in an extra dimension, it’s pretty easy to get used to. It’s actually the quieter, more static scenes, in which characters are standing around or sitting in cars, that fare the worst in the new style.
During more active scenes, the 3D animation is stylized enough to mimic the dynamic line-art of the series and is used to create incredibly smooth, detailed, and visually inventive fight scenes. All told, the animation style doesn’t take away from the action at all, but makes it feel new and exciting. It’s not as pretty as Broly — but man, is anything?
Fun character moments and dynamic action aside, though, Super Hero doesn’t really offer a whole lot to distinguish itself from the countless hours of Dragon Ball content out there. If you already like the series, you’ll probably have fun consuming a little bit more here. But I can’t imagine a newcomer watching Super Hero and thinking it makes much sense, or feeling compelled to dive into the rest of the franchise.
And, y’know, that’s perfectly fine, at least in concept. I respect when a long-running franchise knows that some entries don’t need to be saddled with a summary of the entire series so far. This is a movie in which the series’ secondaries are the leads; it’s not meant as a jumping-on point.
Some sequels are steeped in series lore, and that’s a huge part of what makes them so effective. A great example would be last year’s Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway, the Gundam franchise’s first feature to explore a new era in its continuity in almost 30 years, which uses its context in the greater story to create a compelling and politically-complex new portrait of its world. (Gundam plug achieved; my work here is done.)
But Super Hero is less concerned with using its fans-first orientation to expand the story in an exciting new direction than it is with simply trying to make up for lost time on neglected characters. Piccolo and Gohan have barely been relevant to the various conflicts in Dragon Ball for decades, so its understandable that Toei Animation and DB creator/Super Hero writer Akira Toriyama wanted to give them some long-overdue attention. But the ridiculous (though admittedly funny and self-aware) fashion in which this film jettisons the series’ most powerful players speaks to how deeply Dragon Ball has cornered itself by spending so many years, episodes, and movies building up Goku and Vegeta (not as characters, but as powerhouses) at the expense of literally everyone else, to the point that it’s a feat in itself just to make other fighters feel relevant in any battle.
Sadly, with Goku and Vegeta totally removed from the conflict at hand, and said conflict being pretty self-contained, Super Hero is left feeling more like a feature-length filler episode than a critical chapter in the story. It’s fun filler, for those who already care about these characters, but filler nonetheless.
My fan-brain can’t help but wonder if certain powers revealed here will force interesting status-quo shifts for the series later, potentially resulting in Gohan, Piccolo, and others being more substantially integrated into the main story. That could be cool. But that isn’t established with any certainty here — and Gohan fans are no strangers to seeing his top-dog power-level yanked out from under him. So we’ll see.