They financed two movies this year in the DBZ franchise. They're placed after Majin Buu but before the last three episodes of DBZ.

In the first movie "Battle of Gods" Videl is pregnant. In the second one "Resurrection 'F'" Pan is a baby. Pan actually was a participant in the first movie but she's just a cameo in the second one, which just hit the torrents. (I mention those things because in the last three episodes of DBZ, Pan is about 4 years old.)

Anyway, about Frieza: Toriyama originally intended Frieza to be the ultimate bigbad of the canon. He intended to stop doing it after that arc. But the magazine wouldn't let him stop, so he did Androids/Cell (which IMHO is the best part of the canon) and then Majin Buu (which reeked).

Cell is the best bigbad of the series, and Frieza is second. But we killed him off a long time ago and I thought he was gone forever. (Gohan was something like 6 years old when Trunks offed Frieza, and at the edge of the canon Gohan is grown, married, and has a kid.)

Guess not; Frieza's last few remaining minions managed to collect Earth's dragonballs and wish him back to life. (Which itself violates canon; the dragonballs were never able to bring back evil people.) That's this movie.

Anyway, the problem now with Frieza as an antagonist is that the Saiyajin have left him totally behind in terms of power long since. It was bad enough at the end of DBZ when Goku revealed Super Saiyajin 3, but with Battle of Gods it became even worse when Goku accessed the level "Super Saiyajin God". The opposition that time was Beerus/Bills, the God of Destruction, ostensibly the most powerful being in the universe who spends most of his time sleeping.

Every few years he wakes up and goes out to destroy something, then he returns to his HQ and goes back to sleep. His companion/caretaker/teacher is a strange guy named Whis, who is even faster and more powerful but has no ambition to speak of.

Anyway, Beerus decides not to destroy the Earth, and goes back home for a quick (just a few months) nap. The reason was that he liked Earth cooking. Whis does too, and in Resurrection "F" he's been keeping himself busy training Goku and Vegita in exchange for more Earth cooking.

So Frieza gets resurrected, and spends a few months training and then decides to attack Earth to get revenge on Goku. He brings all his remaining soldiers, about a thousand.

Since Goku and Vegita are away, most of the rest of the Z fighters collect. Krillin, Roshi, Gohan, Piccolo, and Tenshinhan, plus a galactic cop named Jaco.

The soldiers turn out to be wusses, and our five people wipe them all out. The only reason it takes a long time is that there are so many of them.

So then Frieza decides to take a hand, and after one-shotting Gohan, who gets better with a senzu, Goku and Vegita show up. (It's always like that; it's part of the canon.)

And even though Frieza has found a new form and powerup level, Goku and Vegita don't have any trouble with him. It's kind of underwhelming, really.

The big change this time was that Goku has found yet another powerup transformation:

When he achieved "Super Saiyajin God" in Battle of Gods it made his hair crimson. But he had trouble with that, accessing it and maintaining it.

Now he can reach it routinely, but his hair is blue, as is his energy. Frankly, I think it looks awesome.

What's even more cool is that Vegita got it too.

The animation is gorgeous; with a movie budget they spent a lot of money on it, and it shows. But ultimately the idea wasn't a good one, simply because Frieza is completely outclassed as this point of the canon.

It's a shame.

UPDATE: Actually, the single coolest thing in this movie is to see what was done to Frieza in Hell. That was genuinely awesome; extreme punishment indeed.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 02:21 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 678 words, total size 4 kb.