Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero

The full title of the film is Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero, which places it as a filmed adventure within the Dragon Ball Super continuity, with a title of Super Hero. If you're lost, don't worry, the film doesn't really feel the need to help you but you don't need it to either. Though there's plenty (I'm told) to reward existing fans, the film is an entertaining slice of ludicrously over-powered martial action with some broad comedy too.

There are some tremendous bits of character and production design. There's a floating limousine whose roofline has been altered to include a bubble for a prodigious quiff, said vehicle has an arm-rest Oreo-style cookie dispenser and a bobble-head of one of the other characters on the dash. There are plush toys too, a nod to the Dragon Ball franchise's success as a cross-media marketing platform. A fact hammered home by not one but two versions of an advert for the current line of action figures for this, the now superseded current version of the continuity.

Articulation issues extend beyond injection-moulded wrists and ankles. This film is screening with subtitles or redubbed across cinemas, as preferences between "subs" and "dubs" are important. These are made more complicated by the evolving nature of voice-casts, part of the reason Eye For Film saw the subtitled version was that it's apparently easier to tolerate one version of one character's voice than another of another.

There's plenty of expository introduction, but how much of that is useful and how much fan service might split audiences. The things even a casual outsider to Dragon Ball might expect are here. Escalatory dialogue, huge amounts of punching, combats interrupted by numerical declarations ("82%!") and so on. There's a fair few close-ups of buttocks, some outright comical nonsense, and the line "that transformation was within expectations" was commentary as diegetic as the on-screen radio playing a fanfare.

Dragon Ball is closing in on its 40th anniversary, and if there's not somehow an important ruby in the stories to mark that occasion there will doubtless be something else. A film franchise that will use an errant ice-cream tub to stop our heroes from calling in bigger heroes isn't beholden to convention. Except, of course, where it is, which means big (and differently coloured) hair, and kinetic action.

Series creator Akira Toriyama writes, this is Tetsuro Kodama's debut feature film but this shows no uncertainty. I'll grant that joining a production juggernaut as mature as Dragon Ball might make life easy, but plenty of creators have derailed trainsets as established as Toei's. They've more than 20 films, more than 800 episodes of various TV shows, and that's not counting various specials. The influence of Dragon Ball is multiple, there's at least one version of Killmonger's costume that draws influence not from the rest of the Marvel Universe but from Dragon Ball. Black Panther would have been a very different film with the addition of a magic dragon and ripped underpants, though perhaps not as not different as Shang-Chi proved to be.

This is easy enough for a newcomer to get a taste from. I was helped by the equivalent of splash pages, full screens with character names though I could have done with another dozen of them, not least because they were so enjoyable. As is traditional there was a scene after the credits, but the wait for it was made significantly more pleasant by art that appeared to borrow from the style of Jean Giraud (Moebius) whose concept art was one of the many planks of Jodorowsky's Dune. That mixture of styles was continued where there were flashbacks, which used art in the style of earlier outposts of the franchise. That stylistic callback extended to include many of the vehicle designs, though not as compelling as the muscle car of The Bad Guys, I did enjoy the nods to the Renault 5 Rally Edition seen in many of the small commuter vehicles that were frequently near or adjacent to the mishaps.

Anime and TV veteran Naoki Sato provides the score, which works in conjunction with bombastic and brightly coloured chaos. There are various baddies, even more goodies, enough exposition and antics to tell the difference, and while expository dialogue about enemy weak points is a video-game staple that's a genre convention that's in part borrowed from things like Dragon Ball. While its early iterations were a parody in part of Journey To The West Dragon Ball is now a thing itself. To quote the film "you have to be vaguely aware of it", and with that level of awareness Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero doesn't disappoint. I know, not least because I saw it with one, that hardcore fans will get a lot more from it, but there's more than enough here for the casual viewer.