PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*
Japan's long running series of DRAGONBALL Z anime films featuring grown-up Goku and his populous cast ended for a time in 1996, but a new series was launched with BATTLE OF GODS in 2013. Ostensibly this was the first film in which manga-creator Akira Toriyama-- who coincidentally passed away this month-- supervised the production. Apparently the animated film BATTLE served as a sort of "pilot" for a new series of manga-arcs commencing under the rubric DRAGON BALL SUPER in 2015, which was quickly followed by various adaptations for an anime teleseries.
BATTLE introduces the Goku Group to an elder god, Beerus the Lord of Destruction, and his above-it-all assistant Whis. Beerus, who resembles a purple cat-humanoid, tells his majordomo that he had a dream of being defeated by a "Super Saiyan God" who looks exactly like Goku. Accordingly, the two super-beings journey to Goku's corner of the universe. After Beerus has short bout with Goku on the afterlife-world, in which the Saiyan warrior is easily defeated, Beerus and Whis journey to Earth to suss things out, and end up attending Bulma's birthday party.
The script piles on the comedy for roughly half an hour. Not only are Beerus and Whis distracted by the great tastes of the party's Japanese foods, three comic villains from the original DRAGONBALL-- Emperor Pilaf and his two stooges-- are dumped into the mix. The humor isn't Toriyama at his best, though the jokes do serve the purpose of keeping the threat at bay for a bit. Then Beerus eventually takes offense at something, and threatens to obliterate the world unless someone can show him the Super Saiyan God. The solution to this quandary is at least an inventive one, and this leads to yet another epic fight-fest in the approved DRAGONBALL Z manner. Perhaps needless to say, once all the complications are sorted out, Earth is saved.
Beerus then became an intermittent player in the aforementioned DRAGONBALL SUPER storylines. I've the impression that few if any anime feature-films incorporated developments from the SUPER manga-series, but I suppose time will tell.
No comments:
Post a Comment