Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero Review

The franchise’s first 3DCG-animated film is a fun, low-stakes adventure about Gohan getting his groove back.

Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero hits North American theaters on Aug. 19, 2022.

A franchise as old as Dragon Ball – a series at this point (among others) synonymous with the proliferation of anime television in the West – comes with a lot of baggage, fan expectation, increasingly labyrinthine continuity, and perhaps diminishing returns on its best qualities. The recent Dragon Ball Super: Broly managed to answer all of this, delivering a new take on an old fan favorite character in a straightforward, white-knuckle brawler that at the same time took the series back to its paternalistic interests. Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero manages to succeed in a lot of the same ways, with a few differences and new tricks up its sleeve.

Directed by Tetsuro Kodama (who also worked on the first Dragon Ball Super movie, Broly) and with the close involvement of series creator Akira Toriyama, where Broly had the emotional hook in the introduction of Broly as a tragic victim of patriarchal abuse, Super Hero is a more sentimental reunion of the series’ most stable father-son relationship. It turns its action spectacle into a love letter to the bond between one-time villain Piccolo and his surrogate son Gohan – emphasizing that parental relationship to the point where Piccolo even forgets that when Gohan’s daughter Pan says “grandfather,” she means Goku and not him. But, it also must be noted that even as Piccolo is clearly a big old softie (despite his sternness) as well as the better father, this is also a movie that begins with him kicking a 3-year-old into a rock (she’s fine).

It’s a follow up to Broly as well as an older era of the series – more specifically, that of Dragon Ball’s Red Ribbon Army Saga and then Dragon Ball Z’s Android Saga ending with the Cell Games, which for a time felt like a genuine status quo shift to the series as a whole, putting Gohan in the center, before other plans got in the way. Part of Super Hero’s approach of following up on these old arcs is how it essentially picks up where Gohan’s brief time in the spotlight left off, originally meant to inherit his father’s mantle as a defender of Earth, something cemented by his defeat of Cell. The series eventually rolled things back to make Goku the protagonist again, and Gohan receded back to the show’s periphery, which in the long term feels like a shame, stalling a sense of forward momentum, and reducing conflicts to a matter of “when is Goku going to show up?” Gohan’s exit from the spotlight becomes part of the story, Piccolo’s words about how he’ll surpass Goku being thrown back in his face – the film comes off as something of an apology for leaving fan favorite characters in the dust, revisiting Piccolo and Gohan’s paternal relationship and the ways in which Gohan can be better than his father – as a parent and a partner, and as a fighter. In Super Hero’s revisitation of the character, it feels like the better kind of fan service, showing some thoughtfulness about the rich roster of personalities often left at the sidelines in latter-day Dragon Ball stories.

There are a lot of callbacks to a more classic era, more concerned with the events of the original series and Z, which subsequently makes it feel more open to those who had left the show in their youth while it continued on. On that note, as well as those clear reference points, Kodama and Toriyama flaunt a strange interconnected web of lore that even connects to the video games Dragon Ball FighterZ and Kakarot. New characters continue old lineages, such as Dr Hedo, descendant of Gero (the creator of Androids 17 & 18 as well as Cell) and a young genius disliked by all, who dresses in spandex and idolizes superheroes. Hedo – via the manipulations of the Lex Luthor-esque Magenta – ends up aiding in the Red Ribbon Army’s corporate rebranding using superhero iconography, painting the Z fighters (Bulma included) as despotic alien invaders while Cell becomes a martyr.

After a somewhat labored setup recapping old grudges and establishing new threats, Super Hero surprises by how accessible it is to newcomers or viewers who haven’t checked in since Dragon Ball Z, especially as someone who has lost track of the new additions in Super Saiyan transformations. Better still, it eschews so much of what’s associated with Dragon Ball Super, decentring Goku and Vegeta Beerus, Whis, and Broly (who spend most of the film offscreen) and winding back the series’ power creep and long-time escalation of scale, going from battling literal cosmic gods to the Red Ribbon Army, an incredibly old name in Dragon Ball at this point. Even in a series where the same villains come around time and again (that is, if they don’t become allies), the film actually feels more fresh for their return.

There’s a sense of fun in how Super Hero turns the clock back, playing on familiar moments, costumes, and battles as well as how it tells its story. A tongue-in-cheek introduction summarizes villains of ages past, appropriately maintaining a 2D-animated recap, remaking iconic moments in a thrilling and sometimes sepia-toned montage, a narrator asking “Perhaps, dear viewers, some among you have lived long enough to recall the name ‘Red Ribbon Army,’” as it lampshades how back-to-basics the film is getting. It heavily emphasizes the passage of time – it’s been a long time, everyone has continued to move on with their lives somewhat and everyone is a bit rusty – bringing the series’ infamous power creep a little more down to earth, even if every character still gets stronger as soon as they feel like it.

Though it takes time to warm up, the occasional hiccups in pacing and any qualms with the new style melt away pretty quickly.

As Super Hero brings together elements of the series’ past and its potential future, it does so also with its aesthetic ideas. Effectively a sequel to Broly as well as to events long past, it’s appropriate then that it mixes in a new medium for the series with a classical style, using 3D computer-generated animation with a bright, graphic style that feels like a renewal of the classic era of the show, the production team doing strong work translating the familiar look into a new medium of work. Despite there being an uncanny sheen to characters at points, and occasional stiffness during scenes of long conversations, this mode of animation really comes alive in the explosive action sequences, the animation team taking advantage of the ability to introduce a roaming camera in tandem with explosive effects work, swooping around and chasing characters through scenery, adding new dimensions of movement to Super Hero’s various skirmishes. Though it takes a time to warm up, the occasional hiccups in pacing and any qualms with the new style melt away pretty quickly, finding a happy medium between tradition and change.

Better still is when these bouts incorporate the visual language of comics with large, colorful written sound effects (which Piccolo can somehow see), following in the footsteps of Into the Spider-Verse with its various onscreen “KAPOW!”s. With its crossing of Journey to the West with the origin story of Superman, Dragon Ball has always had a bond with Western superhero comics and it’s exciting to see how Super Hero (the title should be a clue) pushes this to the forefront visually. The rest of the time, it’s the kind of action you’d expect from Dragon Ball – screaming and shouting punctuating moments between fast-paced, mid-air brawls, fights that quickly bounce between close-ups of quick attacks and wide angle destruction. Of course, this being the series that it is, there’s also plenty of room for sentiment between energy blasts, or even a heartwarming combination of the two in the case of Gohan, showing his love for his surrogate father through his choice of attack.

For all its wondering about the past and the future of the series, Dragon Ball has timeless pleasures too, partly in that warm familiarity to its characters – Gohan’s passion and pacifism, Piccolo’s stern paternal nature, and even just Bulma’s frivolousness (in one of her finer moments in the film, using wishes granted by an ancient dragon god to give herself a firmer butt). There’s plenty of humor in that familiarity too; the dialogue (this reviewer watched the dub) is playful about audience perception of its characters, lovingly poking fun at them (“I gathered all the mightiest heroes on earth… and Krillin is here too”). It maintains the series’ goofy sense of humor – one character driving a car with a dome to help preserve the integrity of his quiffed hair, while various overconfident henchmen make fools of themselves as they bite off more than they can chew with the extended saiyan family (a Red Ribbon Army tradition).

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The more things change in this series, the more they stay the same, but Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero mostly manages to successfully thread the needle between past and present, both showing love for the now codified personalities of its characters and finding a new path for them. Better still, it does so with an exciting sense of style, pushing the franchise into new aesthetic territory that actually works for the most part, despite some growing pains. While reminders of the franchise’s history sometimes undermine adjustment to these visuals, it’s hard not to be won over by it in the end.