My review will be very short.

This is a dragonball movie NOT dragonball Z. except Goku and Yamcha; the characters are exactly like they were in dragonball. Now, all I’ve seen in db was about half the show. Chichi was a nice girl in dragonball; she did NOT become the loud mouth (from what I saw) `till dragonball Z. now, Yamcha was the same, they just intensified his personality.

They kept piccolo’s story the same. Goku, they also kept. EXCEPT, they did make it out to be that he was from namek. But a sequel could very easily fix that.

Now, I’m going to leave this with a few questions I asked myself going into the theater: Why would they make a movie based solely on the show? Why would you pay money to see a movie you’ve seen 100 times over? And why would you deal with the crowds of a movie theater for a movie you already know?

And I was very surprised: they changed Goku’s style and made it more modern day. But, that was all they changed.

Thank you for reading

Normally, I don’t change my opinion of a film. But in this case, I had to revise my opinion of DB, rather drastically.

Overall, Dragonball: Evolution is a schizophrenic film. On some levels, it captures the essence of the original Dragonball; on other levels, it’s completely wrong.

One oddity early in the development of the movie was that the released trailers actually made it look WORSE than it was — in rather blatant contradiction to the normal approach where you try to make things look better than they are. The trailer led one to believe a number of things that simply weren’t true (i.e., things that had, in fact, NOT been changed from the original were made to appear completely different). Why this was, I don’t know. It’s POSSIBLE the intent was to achieve the effect of making the viewer pleasantly surprised and thus view the movie more positively after the fact, but it seems a very risky method, and one that clearly didn’t work well given that Dragonball:Evolution didn’t make buttloads of money.

Spoilers follow, so don’t read farther if you don’t want to know!

The essence of Dragonball was preserved in some ways. It takes place on a version of Dragonworld — it may be called Earth (“Chikyuu”), but it’s Dragonworld. We have Capsules, and bizarre technology, wierd mixes of cultures… it LOOKS like a Toriyama world, made real, in many ways. On the other hand, much of the early imagery and culture looked too much like our own.

As I rather expected, they fused Gohan and Goku in terms of personality. This actually works well in that it allows us to introduce Goku in an at least somewhat familiar setting.

(Worries about him being a loser being beaten up… no, he’s not. He has been made fun of, but it’s not because he CAN’T fight…)

Chatwin, I’m happy to say, does this version of Goku well. He gets the innocence and awkwardness of the Gohan aspects, and when the time comes to be more “Goku”, he shows it perfectly. Okay, his hair isn’t nine inches high, but it’s spiky in a very Saiyajin way.

Rossum *IS* Bulma. Yes, they’ve given her some action sequences, but I think that improves her character in context.

Chow Yun Fat was, as I said earlier, the RIGHT choice for Mutenroshi/Kamesenin. They toned down his Ecchi nature, leaving just enough of the dirty old man to keep him the same somewhat, er, earthy character.

James Marsters was, in fact, the PERFECT Piccolo. He sounded like Piccolo, he moved like Piccolo, and yes, he was very much GREEN like Piccolo Daimao. This was quite a surprise, given my early impressions.

The casting, thus, was some of the good material in this movie. The plotline IN OUTLINE is pretty much standard Dragonball. The overall script, however, just doesn’t quite manage it. There are clever pieces… but they don’t quite hang together. The spirit’s there, but it’s not allowed all the way OUT.

Oh, one of the lies told in the previews? The mystics who banded together did NOT create the Dragonballs. They invented the Maa Fubaaa, a technique an awful lot of DB fans forget about, to capture and imprison Piccolo. The Dragonballs are, in fact, what they were always supposed to be, and the Great Dragon Shen-Long DOES make an appearance.

The music’s pretty good, too.

Again, that’s some of the good points, but the other pieces didn’t quite gel. It seemed almost as though there was an argument or conflict with both the script and acting/directing as to “how far” to go, how much of the original to keep, and how to do it. One of the characteristics of Dragonball/DBZ is the *SCALE* of conflict, and they just didn’t quite get to the level you need to in the final battle.

So in short, it’s worth viewing, but it doesn’t, alas, manage to give the pure adaptation we could have hoped for.