Ranked #3476

Dragon Ball Z Movie 04: Super Saiyajin da Son Goku

After watching 4 Dragon Ball Z movies each better than the last, to my relief, they've finally stopped improving. I was getting worried at one point that I would have to start rating them like 8 or 9 eventually. :P

This is the first Dragon Ball Z movie that I watched in Japanese... and it turns out this is one of the few anime where the sub does not seem like much of an improvement upon the dub, if at all (assuming the dub in this one is of similar quality to those in other Dragon Ball Z movies). I mean, did they find a bunch of kids to voice this thing?! Because that's what it sounds like, especially Goku's voice.

I think they actually attempted to produce something that's slightly more clever than most Dragon Ball Z movies. Unfortunately, the result isn't pretty. A couple of things happened during the battles that didn't entirely make sense. In addition I'm starting to get a bit tired of the ease at which the Eternal Dragon is summoned, the characters can do it so easily that I'm half expecting them to start collect the dragon balls and summon the Eternal Dragon just to fix a hole in their sock next time round. In case you don't know, once you collect all the dragon balls, you can summon the Eteneral Dragon which grants you a wish, after which the dragon balls all disappears ready to be collected again. Not only does it seem like something that belong more in a game than in a proper storyline, it's also a really bad plot devise that's basically like the cheesey short cut to everything - instead of going through the painstaking process of developing the story, you can just use the Eternal Dragon to get it to where you want it to be and voila, dilemma solved!

But Despite all the flaws, it's still one of the better Dragon Ball Z movies I've seen. read more