Trailer Trash

Posted by Ralph

05 11 2008

Firstly, congratulations to Barack Obama, you carry not just the hopes of your own nation, but those of the entire free world. Good luck sir. Now, back to geekery.

I’ve long since learned to get over the fact that as a video-game fan Hollywood hates me and everything I hold in esteem. If not then why would they continue to give Paul WS Anderson and Uwe Boll money?

Not only does the film industry apparently hate video games, turns out they’re also pretty antsey about anime as well. After months of letting myself get over excited this weekend I finally saw the trailer for the Hollywood remake of Dragonball.

In case you’ve been living on Namek for the last twenty-five years or so Dragonball is a manga series written and drawn by living legend Akira Toriyama. It followed the adventures of alien martial-artist Goku and his friends and was inspired in part by the Chinese folk tale Journey to the West. The narrative covers a period of around thirty years, a total of 519 chapters over 42 volumes. Toei animation translated Toriyama’s works into two successful anime series. Dragonball and Dragonball Z originally broadcast on Fuji television from 1986 to 1996. A third series Dragonball GT continued Goku’s adventures, but was not based on the original manga, and ran for only 64 episodes.

The Hollywood rework of Dragonball doesn’t seem all that bad on paper. Kung-fu Hustle’s Stephen Chow is producing, director James Wong is best known for his work on the Final Destination movies, so a strange choice to direct what is essentially a children’s movie, but I am a fan of FD so I’m willing to give benefit of the doubt. The cast includes one of my favourite TV actors James Marsters as the film’s antagonist Lord Piccolo, and Chow Yun Fat as Sensei Roshi. The rest of the cast is less inspiring though with Justin Chatwin (Tom Cruise’s whiney runt son in Speilberg’s Car-crash remake of War of the Worlds) in the lead as Goku.

After watching the trailer, I’m starting to worry just a little that this isn’t going to be the movie that the franchise deserves, the trailer involves scenes set if not in, then at least outside an American high school, this seems a little out of sync with the world in which the series is based. The trailer involves scenes featuring Piccolo in which I can’t help but notice that he isn’t green, despite claims that the character would look similar to how he appeared in the anime, in a similar pallette error Emmy Rossum’s portrayal of Bulma Briefs is sorely lacking the original’s blue hair.

Finally and this is where i earn the “Rant” tag, WHERE THE FUCK IS KRILLIN? I read somewhere that some of the more cartoon-esque characters wouldn’t appear in the movie, that’s fine, I can understand why an anthropomorphic pig, or a talking cat might get the chop but Krillin is Goku’s best friend in both the manga and the Anime. Former bandit-king Yamcha is the only one of the Z-fighters set to make an appearance in the movie. The film adds further characters to Goku’s circle of friends which didn’t appear in the manga, and I find it hard to accept that one of these characters couldn’t be Krillin, this is a reimagining of Dragonball, so Krillin doesn’t have to be a short, bald, buddhist monk, but a character portraying several of Krillin’s character traits would have been a kindness to fans of the series.