Bro. Do you even Ball, bro? Not basketball, bro—Dragon Ball, bro! The new movie—Broly—is nice, bro. It’s got Goku, and Vegeta, and all that good Saiyan shit. But that’s not even half of it, bro. Because Broly? He’s brolic, bro! Swole! Girthed! Look at those biceps, bro. Brolic.
—Teenage male Dragon Ball fan, attrib.
I have mused before—and may muse again, perhaps on this very site!—on what I once saw as the inevitable fate of every shōnen anime: that eventually, all shōnen anime become Dragon Ball Z. I was this close to declaring it as a rule. Think about it. From Yu Yu Hakusho to Rurouni Kenshin to My Hero Academia, at some point, each shōnen morphs from whatever its original concept was into a show in which all the badass characters spend a busted amount of time charging their projectiles and/or battle techniques while other badasses stand on the sidelines and explain to the less badass characters next to them—our audience stand-ins—just how badass the charging, and consequent firing and/or slicing, of said lazar and/or reverse-bladed sword actually is.
Except I had forgotten one fundamental truth: nothing, and I mean nothing, does over-the-top badassery and laser-firing to the self-parodying levels that Dragon Ball properties do. There is only one word that adequately describes a Dragon Ball property, and that is “brolic,” a word that might actually have been coined in reference to the Dragon Ball character Broly, first introduced in a trilogy of non-canonical Dragon Ball Z films in 1993 and ’94.
Fans were obsessed with Broly—whose name is a reference to “broccoli,” and whose father’s name is “Paragus” (take a guess); this vegetal riffage is uh, quite common in DBZ names—and as such, it was mildly inevitable that Akira Toriyama, creator of Dragon Ball (and the Broly character), would eventually helm an official movie with him as the antagonist. And so it was to be that earlier this month, Dragon Ball Super: Broly arrived, and it was…brolic.
Some animation-loving media pals of mine have called this film a “visually packed and unabashedly enjoyable” exercise in “pure fan-service.” In a word, yes: a truly suspenseful and intense prologue leads into an outrageously goofy setup for perennial villain Frieza’s attempt to steal the Dragon Balls from our heroes (read: Bulma), which leads to about 30 minutes of main protagonists Goku and Vegeta, along with Broly, charging their powers and beating the ever-loving snot out of each other mid-air while screaming “AAAAAAHHHHH” a whole lot. The arctic waste upon which their battle is set becomes a flooded lava plain at least twice in the span of that 30 minutes. And there’s a training sequence involving Piccolo, because of course there is.
My co-editor, Eric, fell asleep on my couch for about five minutes before the sheer brolicness (brolicitude?) of the whole affair ensured he was glued to the screen for the remainder of the laser-firing. My roommate, Michael, heard so much screaming in the living room he emerged from his room—a relative rarity—to ask what was wrong. He’s never done that when I’ve watched Fullmetal Alchemist, that’s for sure. (Except for when I was crying.) Shōnens may all share some melodramatic DNA, but Dragon Ball—and Broly—are in another league entirely. They’re melo-brolic, bro. Don’t you forget it.
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