Dragon Blog Super #38: Hold My Beerus
Article by Sean Wilkinson,
a.k.a. The Anime Hakaishin
Five months in a row now, Just the Ticket has surpassed my long-standing goal of ten thousand views (even in the absence of regularly scheduled content), and as you can see below in the "Last Month" category, as of Saturday evening, October finished just north of the new Road To 15k Views goalpost I set in the latest Time Drops.
Speaking of types of people (and totally natural transitions between completely unrelated topics), there are those who have seen and read all things Dragon Ball from multiple sources in multiple languages multiple times. And while that's partially true of me with regard to Dragon Ball Z's Saiyan Saga and Namek Saga (thank you, Toonami! And thank my sarcasm, too, while you're at it...) and some episodes of the Buu Saga (gracias por Gotenks y Vegetto, Telemundo! No necesitamos dar gracias por mi sarcasmo aqui), I am not that ningen. I don't have that kind of time anymore.
So I've only seen each Super-era thing (minus the extended Battle Of Gods cut and the manga version) once. I'm relying on my memory and first impressions for the opinions you'll see here and in future reviews, and sources like Geekdom101, MasakoX, MistareFusion, Carthu, Totally Not Mark, and Team FourStar for the comparative details.
With two versions of the Battle Of Gods movie, a promotional manga adaptation, and a rushed but poorly paced and inconsistently (virally so in at least one instance) animated...anime adaptation, did Dragon Ball Super: Beerus need to exist?
Perhaps not, given all of the other takes on the production, but the anime, and Toei Animation as a studio, certainly needed to trade in MS Paint Goku, Beerus.png, and crosseyed Freeza for an efficient, smooth-running Vespa, and totally redeem themselves.
So, Dragon Ball Super: Beerus does exist, and so far I've seen the first three episodes (with plans to cover the fourth and an unknown number of future episodes in a week to come). I like it. It's not perfect, but it's far better than what we got over ten years ago. Like, miles and light-years better. Sorry if it sounds like I'm underselling the series, but I'm trying not to oversell it, either; I'll give the hype moments and smart touches the respect they deserve, and criticize what I found fault with, too. Creation and Destruction are two sides of the same coin, after all.
Now, let's begin with the OP:
"Onogami" by Megatera•Zero is a banger, full-stop. Like, I don't understand the hate Kazuya Yoshī's "Chōzetsu☆Dynamic" gets (or the love Kiyoshi Hikawa's "Genkai Toppa×Survivor" gets, for that matter), but "Onogami" is hype as hell and feels like it was written especially for this series and for Goku as a character, speaking directly to his relationship with the God transformation ("this is/isn't my power, believe in yourself"), fighting, and Beerus ("the clash of strength and strength crosses oceans and skies, far into space"). It may be the most banger, most Goku theme the franchise has seen since "Challa Head Challa," and while the screamo bits didn't land with me at first, I love it and the accompanying animation that symbolizes Goku's history and hints that the Beerus anime's planned twenty-ish episodes may cover more ground that just Battle Of Gods (Freeza and Cabba are shown as well).Animeister's Note: While looking up the old Super OPs, I happened upon the Japanese version of "Genkai Toppa×Survivor," including the live performance I linked to above, and I feel I must correct and qualify myself. Having only seen Super dubbed, I absolutely loved the English version of "Chōzetsu☆Dynamic" because the vocals were decently expressive and reminded me a bit of REM's Michael Stipe. Hearing it in Japanese, it's more safe and nasally-sounding, almost monotone in delivery. Conversely, the English "Limit Break×Survivor" reeks of decades-old pop-punk, like it's the theme to Phineas & Ferb or something. Hearing the original Japanese, and especially the live performance, it's sonically rich, vocally hype, and far better than my "they changed the opening for this‽" experience with the dub had prepared me for.
Beerus and Whis are a mixed bag for me here. On one hand, Beerus is competently conveyed as an intimidating threat with the cinematography, the cosmic indifference of his behavior, and his prophetic dreams giving him power and agency beyond just "strong cat who destroys."
Episode One: "The God Who Destroys"
Instead of following the kids as they fight the Anaconda to get Videl toilet water for her birthday, the first episode does the bit where Goku is a radish farmer (kind of morbid to have to repeatedly exhume your dead brother for profit, but whatever) until he gets bored and trains (cratering the radish field in several places in the process) while Goten drives the tractor off a cliff.
The new addition here, which I heard is from the manga, is Goku doing image training of his fights with Freeza, Cell, and Kid Buu (the latter of which we don't see outside of sonic explosions in the...sky?...because that wasn't in the animation budget, I guess).
And the animation is good. Really good. It's fluid and the lines and detail are like Daima quality, even when Goku is just eating or pulling a giant root vegetable out of the ground. I don't like what the lighting and aura filters do to the visual quality in some scenes, but I can already tell this is going to be a good product.
There's also effort made to give Beerus an intimidation factor with how he's framed and lit, and his waking yawn being a menacing growl that can be heard across the Universe.
Mr. Satan donating his World Peace Prize money to Goku is also a plot point here so Goku can be on King Kai's planet later (and feel free to start your "Satan would be a better President than Trump" memes now), and comes with a decent pun from Goku (the "in that case" line as he reluctantly accepts the Z100 million briefcase).
Speaking of vegetables, it's more tell than show, but Vegeta gets a properly stated motivation for why he's still chasing Goku even though he seemingly settled that aspect of his character by the end of the Buu Saga. It's simple, but that's why it makes sense.
And speaking of puns, King Kai is back with a joke or two so new viewers can have a basic understanding of his character, his relationship with Goku, and why Goku wants to train on his planet instead of Earth. Again, it's a bit tell-heavy and awkward, but it serves its purpose for the intended audience. And it's not like the episode is simple from this point on, either. It cuts rapidly from Vegeta's gravity room training, to Goku's arrival on King Kai's planet, to that scene where Beerus hakais half of the French pigs' planet for serving him Xenomorph pie and fatty slop (showing Beerus isn't above making a cosmically macabre pun of his own), to a reaction shot of Old Kaioshin and the fused KibitoKai (complete with some tea foreshadowing for the Goku Black arc), and culminating in a cool fight sequence where Beerus and Whis "visit" what I'm calling the "HoHo" planet, fight their champion for a taste of the Czar Dragon from Super Mario RPG, and then get a case of the sour grapes and hakai the planet into a reasonable facsimile of Apokolips, kick-starting Beerus' memory of his prophetic dream of the Super-Saiyan God.
On the other hand, Japanese Beerus and Whis are not my Beerus and Whis. Jason Douglas and especially Ian Sinclair are the voices I know and like (I even heard Chris Rager when I was reading Mr. Satan's subtitles earlier), and the Japanese voices don't hit for me yet. That isn't to say I won't ever like them; just that my first impression was underwhelming.
And the biggest issue that undercuts the intended mood and fails as a running gag: Beerus constantly forgetting the Super-Saiyan God is dumber than colon skin. It's an easily excisable padding tactic left over from a poorly padded series that doesn't need to be here (except that it sets up the need for another character that doesn't need to be here in the next episode), and makes this interpretation of Beerus goofier than he needs to be. Woodshed this joke with a shotgun, now.
Episode Two: "The God Of Destruction Heads To the Planet Of the Kai"
In the original anime, the plot of this episode would have probably just been the title, with the ensuing fight happening the next episode. But not in Dragon Ball Super: Beerus!
This episode is the proving ground for whether Dragon Ball Super could be redeemed for its animation and writing, and whether a fourth remake needed to exist.
Mission accomplished and package accepted!
Well, kind of. The episode starts off with some stupid exposition to establish the Kaioshin/Destroyer relationship and have Beerus forget the Super-Saiyan God...again (which also devalues Whis as the straight man because he forgot it, too), forcing the introduction of the Oracle Fish (that unnecessary character I mentioned above, especially because she can't remember the Super-Saiyan God at first, either) as a second opinion. Her entrance made me think she might be a decent base-level training partner for Goku (sort of a Korin or Popo parallel for this stage of godly learning), but two prophetic characters with bad memories is three too many.
We also get dumb shit like Beerus revealing how bad he is at his job because he outsourced Planet Vegeta's destruction to Freeza (we have an entire manga and anime showing how that didn't work) and apparently caused the extinction of the dinosaurs on Earth (here referred to as Planet 4032 Green-877, which is probably a reference I don't understand, and again, the entirety of Dragon Ball is evidence that he didn't hakai the dinosaurs).
But then the redemption of Dragon Ball Super truly begins. About halfway through the episode, we get the fight between Goku and Beerus on King Kai's planet, and while it hits the same basic points as the virally terrible Super Episode 5, this version is wall-to-wall peak animation, stuffed with tension, dramatic scoring, appropriately timed comedic beats, and an actual show-don't-tell fight narrative with personality, including a natural take on Goku's original Super-Saiyan 3 reveal (making for the most epic transformation since he shook the afterlife in Fusion Reborn), some unique no-selling by Beerus (who can afford to be aggressively curious because he's almost too strong to die), and maybe some Ultra Instinct foreshadowing? I did not expect to have feelings about Battle Of Gods Version 5.0: The Enhanced Edition, but this episode was absolutely squee-worthy.
Episode Three: The God Of Destruction Heads To Earth
The best part of this episode is Vegeta's dynamic with Beerus. Sadly, we don't get the Bingo dance here, and stuff like the introduction of the Pilaf Gang and the setting of events going forward (Bulma's birthday yacht) feel awkwardly under-established considering the things that went over-explained in previous episodes. The yacht is the setting because it was the setting in the anime. The Pilaf Gang are there because they were there in the movie and anime, and they get about as much explanation as they did in either. Like with Oracle Fish, it's a case of "why even have them at all?" Could it be that Toei still intend on doing the gross Trunks subplot?
Anyway, I love how Vegeta's first encounter (as an adult) with Beerus is composed like a slasher kill sequence, and how Vegeta gets to be cowed without losing his dignity so that when the slap comes, this new take on "My Bulma!" reads more clearly as love transcending primordial fear, and it makes sense that Vegeta would be able to land hits (and draw blood‽) on Beerus that Goku could not. It's less entertaining than the Goku fight (despite what Beerus says), but just as narratively compelling in a different way. And even though it wasn't naturally established, the yacht and open ocean give things a sense of scale and allow Vegeta to get another Moses moment akin to his fights with Freeza and Tamagami #2.
There's not much to the animation outside of Beerus and Vegeta, though. I mean, Bulma interacting with Beerus is a joy, Buu wailing on Beerus was a surreal visual, and I got a kick out of the gag with Beerus and Gotenks, too. But crowd animation is almost nonexistent, and the sequence of Beerus no-selling everyone while he laments not getting to perform an epicurean dissection of pudding looks like a bunch of jpegs bouncing off of each other.
In the end, though, all fat pink extras look alike when you're a quasi-immortal, mass-murdering Gordon Ramsey cat, and the episode cliffhangers with Earth's fate in the rock-, paper-, or scissor-shaped hand of Oolong, as was originally intended.
The fourth episode is to be titled "The God Of Saiyans," suggesting we'll at least get to see the ritual happen, but I'll cover that another time.
I say "another time" because I'll be spending the next two weeks on Godzilla: Singular Point and the fifth season of Is It Wrong To Try To Pick Up Girls In A Dungeon? So Stay Tuned, and as always, please continue to support me and what I do by Becoming A Ticketholder (none of you have yet), leaving a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, helping out my ad revenue as you read so I can buy Beerus some pudding, and following me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Patreon, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.
Animeister,
Out.
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