Dragon Ball Super: Broly is a 2018 Japanese animated feature film by Toei Animation, and was made into an English Dub by Funimation Films (which is the version I’m reviewing by the way), and was distributed theatrically for an official USA release by 20th Century Fox for the year; 2019 (January 16th, 2019 to be more specific). The movie’s screenplay (or script however you’d like to call it) is also written by the creator of the Dragon Ball franchise; Akira Toriyama (thus making this entire movie canon to the whole franchise).
The primary plot of the film without going into any spoilers is that after Universe 7 won the tournament of power seen in the Dragon Ball Super anime TV series and manga (that’s not a spoiler by the way as even a lot of the official marketing and advertising for the film explained this even before it come out in theaters), Frieza (who participated in the tournament of power, and was brought back to life as a reward), still wants revenge against Goku and Vegeta, so he ends up discovering two lost surviving Saiyans named Paragus, and Broly (who this movie is named after) thanks to some of his own troops finding them on a deserted planet.
With Broly’s immense power, Frieza now decides take advantage of the opportunity to use Broly in order to have him kill both Goku, and Vegeta, but perhaps there is a whole lot more to Broly’s power than anyone else can even realize.
Before I begin explaining my thoughts on the film in great detail, I must also point out that there is also another story that happens in the movie that while it does a very good job at connecting to the rest of the movie (as well as the main franchise’s continuity), I prefer to not to say too much about it for this review as I really do want people to see Dragon Ball Super: Broly without it being ruined, and I will explain why I say such.
I usually like to start with positive aspects, but for this review, I prefer to start it off with some minor nitpicks worth mentioning since I did notice them when seeing this movie in a big screen theater, and they thankfully don’t contain spoilers.
The first is that while the movie does acknowledge the fact it takes place after the Universal Survival Saga, I felt the movie didn’t explain that too well as it mostly came off as a short mention, which isn’t a bad thing, but for those watching the film that have never seen that story arc in Dragon Ball Super, a lot of confusion is bound to occur.
The second nitpick is that since this movie does have a slightly different art style to its animation, while it is indeed good to look at for a theatrically-released film, I wasn’t really too impressed with how the character of Beerus looked since I felt that in some scenes, this face looked like that of a Dog’s as opposed to a cat. But again, it’s only a nitpick as opposed to a major part of the film.
Now on to the positives since there are indeed lots of them I want to talk about for this review. As I already mentioned, the animation and the art style presented in Dragon Ball Super: Broly are great to look at, and truly show the amount of money, effort, and passion that was put into it looking nice (despite my nitpick about Beerus’s new design). One thing to mention about the animation before I forget is that there are small moments where CGI (Computer-Generated-Images) is used for some scenes, and they surprisingly look ever good and never detract from the hand-drawn animation.
The fights scenes were simply epic and really help add to the martial arts feel the series is most well-known for thanks to them being very fast-paced, but never in a way they were hard to follow.
The English Dub provided by Funimation Films was done very well with each voice actor displaying a good voice performance, and each of the voices matching the respective characters very well. At the time of me making this review, I haven’t seen this movie in Japanese with English subtitles yet, so I sadly cannot say if the original Japanese voice acting was also good, nor can I also compare it to the English Dub. But from what I’ve seen, the English Dub is still very good to hear.
The soundtrack provided by Norihito Sumitomo in Dragon Ball Super: Broly is extremely energetic for all the right reasons, and fits a martial arts sci fi action movie such as this very well.
As for the overall story concerning the main plot of the film (and just the whole movie in general), it isn’t anything way too unique for those unfamiliar with Dragon Ball, but the story is indeed a fun joyride to those who are fans of Dragon Ball as it contains all the ingredients necessary to make a fun Dragon Ball movie (there are also a lot of fun little “Easter Eggs” present in the film).
Dragon Ball Super: Broly may only appeal to hardcore Dragon Ball fans in the sense that it does require lots of knowledge about the franchise to fully (and truly) appreciate it, but it is still a very fun and entertaining film that I had the honor to watch in a big screen American cinema, and I can most certainly recommend it to Dragon Ball fans since it is also canon to the franchise.
I give Dragon Ball Super: Broly Two Thumbs Up, and 5/5 Stars.
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