"Dragon Ball Super: Broly" and the softening of Akira Toriyama

The legendary mangaka was, at heart, a big 'ol softy - and we loved him for it

My friends Chris and Parker and I have a weekly Kung Fu movie night here in Iowa City, where we watch a lot of the Hong Kong classics that have only recently started being available in good quality on Blu-ray in the West – stuff like Royal Warriors, Yes, Madam!, Iron Monkey, One-Armed Boxer, and so on – and when Akira Toriyama passed away earlier this month, I told them they had to let me bring a Dragon Ball movie to celebrate his passing. After all, it was exactly that kind of movie, and adjacent Wuxia epics of a slightly earlier period, that influenced a lot of Toriyama’s early approach on Dragon Ball. But mostly, I just wanted to share some Dragon Ball with my friends who had never seen it before. I had a few options in mind of good films that could serve as an introduction to two Dragon Ball newbies – the 10^th anniversary film The Path to Power, or maybe a double feature of the first two Dragon Ball Z movies. But I landed on 2018’s Dragon Ball Super: Broly, having a hunch it would do the trick both because it’s truly that spectacular a production, and because the narrative starts way back at the beginning with the destruction of Planet Vegeta, and focuses on a pretty small set of core characters who are archetypal enough for anyone to ‘get’ really easily. The subsequent film, Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero would be tougher in this context because you would need to know Gohan and Piccolo and the whole context of that relationship to enjoy the film. But Broly is really first and foremost about its title character, newly introduced to us here, so it’s actually a surprisingly effective jumping on point. 

As expected, it was a lot of fun to see their reactions to the film, which played like gangbusters. There’s a universal appeal to Toriyama’s work – the comedy, the characters and character designs, the richness of world building – and a specific set of strengths to this film – the ludicrously accomplished animation and fight choreography – that make Broly pretty effortlessly engaging for any and all viewers, no matter how much Dragon Ball they’ve seen before. And being in the proximity of friends getting their first real taste of the series was a joyous experience that made me love this great movie all the more. 

In the aftermath of Toriyama’s passing, though, the film also played a bit differently to me than it has before. It occurred to me that there are two specific interventions he makes on the larger ‘lore’ of Dragon Ball – two places where Toriyama comes in on story points that other creative figures in Toei’s anime adaptations had made choices that he decides to revise, on Bardock and Broly specifically – that say so much about what kind of storyteller he was, and even more importantly, what kind of storyteller he was becoming in the final decade of his life, when he returned to Dragon Ball with a newfound zeal in – and pride for – his most iconic work.

First is the subtle retcon that Bardock sends Goku to earth to escape Freeza’s impending attack, not to kill all the humans and prepare the planet for sale, as we were led to believe by Raditz and Vegeta in the Saiyan arc of the main series. This is a change Toriyama first tried out in the Dragon Ball Minus bonus chapter of Jaco the Galactic Patrolman in 2013, and has been controversial among fans ever since; this is, after all, a very different Bardock than the character we saw in the fan-favorite 1990 Bardock TV special, which Toriyama didn’t work on but was fond enough of to briefly incorporate the character into the manga. Changing Bardock’s motivations here doesn’t actually disrupt the series’ core continuity much, since Raditz and Vegeta just assume Kakarrot was sent away to do some conquering, as all the other Saiyan children are, but it complicates Bardock as a character and Goku’s entire relationship with his Saiyan heritage, suggesting there was more capacity for love and empathy among this violent warrior race than we were previously led to believe. I understand why certain fans have raised eyebrows at that, but I like how Toriyama frames it in this film’s script, which is a better, more fulsome treatment of the idea than we got in the short Dragon Ball Minus chapter. The notion that ‘Saiyan Pride’ could also mean a guy like Bardock trying to do one good, loving thing in the midst of a life that was lived amongst, and ended in, violence is a powerful one. That Goku’s life was touched by love even back at his origin is meaningful, with the film suggesting that Bardock interrupted the brutal cycle of his people just before he died, so that the son he saved could go on to definitively break that cycle by being a hero and a (often absent but generally loving and well-meaning) family man, and to redeem the other survivors of the Saiyan race. The end of Dragon Ball Super: Broly is, significantly, the first time Goku ever calls himself Kakarrot (it’s even more pointed in the Japanese script than in the slightly-altered English dub, with Goku directly saying “I’m Goku and Kakarrot”). It suggests that the encounter with this other Saiyan has made him rethink his heritage just a little, and while Goku has no way of knowing about what Bardock did forty-some years ago, there’s a little echo at the end there, a suggestion that for all the terrible things the Saiyans did, maybe the residual goodness that was buried deep within them survived in Goku, who has spread that redemptive potential far and wide. It all feels purposeful to me, like Toriyama was softening just a bit on this corner of his universe as a way of allowing both Goku and the audience to approach the Saiyan story with fresh eyes.

Second, and even more significantly, is the re-writing of Broly himself. Originally created by writer Takao Koyama for three very bad Dragon Ball Z movies from the 1990s (Movies 8, 10, and 11), Broly in those appearances was little more than an empty, mindless killing machine, the faint sparks of personality seen in movie 8 completely extinguished in films 10 and 11, the character’s striking design being the only thing to really latch onto with him. Toriyama had nothing to do with those films, of course, and here, he reimagines Broly in the most prototypically Toriyama way possible: As a big ‘ol softy who just wants some friends, and only fights because violent people keep throwing him off the deep end without a life preserver. If anything could ever be defined as the ‘Toriyama touch,’ that’s it. The 90s version of Broly always felt ‘wrong’ in this universe, because there are no mindless killing drones in Toriyama’s world. Villains often turn out to be complex three-dimensional figures capable of immense change (Piccolo, Vegeta), and the ones who don’t at least have extremely vibrant personalities (Freeza, Cell); Boo turns people into chocolate and eats them, but he also comes to see a blind boy and a dog as his family and breaks when they are hurt. The old incarnation of Broly just wasn’t a Toriyama character. But this Broly? The Broly who loves simple space granola bars and big furry friends, who doesn’t want to fight and is scared of upsetting his dad? The one who almost loses himself to violence but is saved by two friends bravely making a wish on the Dragon Balls? That’s a Toriyama character. 

What I’m saying is Akira Toriyama was also a big ‘ol softy, and he revealed more of that side of himself with age. The revisions to Bardock and Broly in this film are closely linked, two sides of the same coin – softening characters previously defined through violence, and in so doing, making them into figures rich enough to be worthy of Dragon Ball. It’s one of the unifying themes of his work in the last decade, starting with Battle of Gods, continuing through the story suggestions he made on Dragon Ball Super, and culminating in both Broly and in the beautiful found family storytelling of Super Hero. There are a lot of spectacular fights in his world, but there are also a lot of laughs, and a lot of love. That last part doesn’t get talked about enough, but it was always there. It was always real, and it always mattered. It’s part of what has animated Dragon Ball for 40 years now, and by injecting that back into the series during the second wind of popularity it has enjoyed this past decade, Toriyama bought his most famous creation a second lease on life. And, of course, it’s a very big part of why we’re all mourning the guy who spread that love out into the world.

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