DragonBall Super: Broly (Dir Tatsuya Nagamine, 1h 50m)

 

There was a time when anime and manga were not part of the mainstream. It's difficult to imagine now, at a point where Pokémon sits at the zenith of popular culture, a juggernaut that dwarfs even Marvel and Star Wars in pure bankability, where manga now regularly outsells american comics exponentially, that there was a point where Japanese comics and cartoons weren't a sizable part of western teen culture. Before, however, anime and manga were a badland of badly dubbed, heavily edited anime and bowdlerised manga in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
 And then came Toonami, a late evening & night slot on Cartoon Network. And everything changed. Riding atop the wave that crashed in over the English speaking world, likely on a cloud-shaped surfboard, was a series, based upon a manga by Akira Toriyama. Dragon Ball Z.

Dragon Ball Z, the sequel to Toriyama's Dragon Ball, best described as a sci-fi retelling of seminal Chinese work Journey to the West, is itself best described as a mixture of space opera, soap opera, and every single kung-fu movie ever made, with protagonist Goku fighting ever more outlandish and dangerous characters seeking to either destroy the world or conquer it. Following this has been a number of series, of which, the most recent, Dragonball Super, a series so wildly popular that its final episodes were screened live in several South American countries, an act usually reserved for that other South American religion, football, to which this film acts as a sequel.

Focusing upon the trio of Saiyan (a human-ish race who have incredible power, as well as the curse to turn into apes), Goku (Sean Schemmel), his rival, Vegeta (Christopher Sabat), and the fearsome, vengeance-set Broly, (Vic Mignogna), Broly wastes no time in getting down to business, once more retelling the backstory of all three of these characters, from noble Vegeta, bred to conquer and his father, King Vegeta's pride and joy, to humble Goku, sent for his own protection to Earth in an echo of Moses and Superman, to Broly, whose incredible latent power threatens the position King Vegeta has planned for his son. Following his son, as he is sent off world, Broly's father, Paragus plots the downfall of King Vegeta, and, following the destruction of the Saiyans' planet by recurring villain, Freiza  (Christopher Ayres) against his son.

One fastforward through over 600(!) episodes, and Broly drops us back exactly where Super left off (apparently-I'm going to be honest here and say I'm still marathoning through the original DragonBall at time of writing), with our heroes recovering and relaxing after the aftermath of the events of Super, with catlike god of destruction Beerus (who sadly, for such a cool character remains on child-care duty throughout the movie), and his former master, Whis, together with Bulma (Monica Rial) in tow

Everything does not stay so idlyyic for long, as someone steals six of the seven Dragonballs required to make a wish, thus thwarting Bulma's plans to look five years younger and seems destined to recover the seventh-to no great surprise, and with its tongue firmly in cheek, Broly quickly reveals it's Freiza, who himself plans to use the Dragonballs to grow five centimetres taller.

With his forces finding Broly on the planet he and his father were marooned on for decades, and with two saiyans now on his side, so Freiza gives the duo of exiled saiyans a chance to get their revenge, whilst helping Freiza gain the final Dragonball and grant his (rather outlandish) wish, sets the stage for a titanic battle between Vegeta and Goku, and Broly, in which all three are tested to their limits, and beyond. What follows is one of the best battles, not only in Dragonball, but in anime full-stop, a visually stunning kinetic feast of a final act that ranks alongside the auteurish Redline in its jawdropping vitality.

Our heroes throw each other through mountains, camera tracking through, we get POV shots with hands throwing blocks and attacks, we get a showdown between Goku, weakened and isolated, and an imperious, violent Broly, lost to animalistic rage, where every blow hits hard, till it almost becomes wince-inducing, a vitality that puts these fights on a par with any of the great boxing movies. These are fights that evolve and develop, destroying terrain-the snowy mountains that make up the setting for the majoity of this film blown apart in spectacular fashion-leaving our heroes in tattered clothing, fighting in an almost hellish landscape

Yet it is also a film that, at its centre, explores relationships, with Broly's father turning his son into a weapon, and a terrifying one at that, dehumanising his son in a quest for revenge, whilst Freiza's underlings, newcomers Cheelai and Lemo, try to save Broly from the scars of his childhood, whilst Goku and Vegeta's eventual merging to defeat Broly shows how far they have come as characters. It is also a film where every character feels fleshed out-Broly is a man of few words, but a perfectly animated creature of raw destruction, growing angrier and more powerful the longer the fight goes on, whilst Goku and Vegeta are animated more fluidly, and voiced to perfection by Schemmel and Sabat, their banter enjoyable and by this point, that of old friends. Even Freiza's twists and turns from gloating villain to butt of not one but two jokes mark what is, after all, a murderous tyrant, out as a nigh perfect, if enjoyably flawed, villain.

Moreover, it is nearly three decades of Dragonball perfectly crystalised into a single film, in ethos, narrative and execution, a film that revels, on the biggest scale, in the oddball humour, emotional sincerity, and all-out action that make up Dragonball. Behind it lies thirty years of one of the best anime series ever made. But, for the casual fan, Dragonball Super Broly is a film that, at its very best, grabs your brain, smashes it through the back of your skull and keeps it pinned to your seat for nearly two hours in a giddy technicolour celebration of anime action at its very best

Rating: Highly Recommended