Title : Top Review: Dragon Ball Kai 2009 (DBKai 1-98) by top Blogger
link : Top Review: Dragon Ball Kai 2009 (DBKai 1-98) by top Blogger
Top Review: Dragon Ball Kai 2009 (DBKai 1-98) by top Blogger
Dragon Ball GT ended due to a lack of interest in 1997, and the Dragon Ball franchise would remain dormant for over a decade on Japanese TV. DB/Z/GT finally came to home video and to the Next Gen gaming consoles in the early 2000s, but the prospect of new animation seemed unlikely any time soon. But this isn't the story of Dragon Ball's return to newly animated material. This is the story of recycled animation. Enter: Dragon Ball Kai.
You can find my other reviews here: http://thedragonballblog.blogspot.com/search/label/review
Dragon Ball Kai (2009-2011)
Rating: Not Recommended
Announced as a way to celebrate Dragon Ball Z's 20th anniversary, Dragon Ball Kai was sold to us as a "refreshed" broadcast. Everything you love about Dragon Ball Z, upscaled into HD, and given a sort of Director's Cut to make it more resemble the manga's pacing. Except that's not what it was. Dragon Ball Kai removed the classic soundtrack, re-recorded the dialogue (with many characters recast due to retirement, death, or some other reason), and redrew frames, with an embarrassingly noticeable drop in quality, for the sake of censorship, converting the picture for a widescreen broadcast, and removing strobing and other old special effects.
While filler is indeed removed, that isn't always a good thing. Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z were made by a veteran staff of top notch writers, animators, and directors (and also Uchiyama was there too). Every episode of Dragon Ball Z was expertly directed by Daisuke Nishio, with scripts overseen and often written by Takao Koyama, and an award-winning musical score crafted and lovingly placed by Shunsuke Kikuchi. Every episode of DBZ has a clear artistic vision, a tone, an arc, all to tell in its 24 minutes of air time. Dicing it up and stitching it back together doesn't automatically make a show more true to the source material. It just makes a show that isn't as good as either the original manga, or the TV show from which it's recycled.
Animation Remastered
Dragon Ball Kai's greatest strength and greatest weakness is the same thing: The visuals. When Dragon Ball Kai is content upscaling and color correcting Dragon Ball Z's original animation, it looks gorgeous. Few parts of this blog has been as fun as watching these classic pieces of 90s Toei animation in 1080 resolution, frame by loving frame, letting the beautiful work of all those animators wash over me as if it were the first time truly appreciating their effort. Alternatively, when Dragon Ball Kai is redrawing shots so that it can be aired Sunday morning in widescreen, it looks like someone redrew it in MS Paint. Or more succinctly, it looks like dogshit.
Music Remastered
Dragon Ball Kai has a long, strange history with its music. The tl;dr is: Long time DBZ music contributor Kenji Yamamoto scored Dragon Ball Kai in place of Shunsuke Kikuchi's original score, but Yamamoto got in trouble for plagiarizing basically his whole catalogue, so his score was removed from Kai and replaced with seemingly random selections of Kikuchi's score.
If you watched Dragon Ball Kai as it was airing in Japan, episodes 1 through 95 had the Yamamoto score, only for the Kikuchi replacement to end the series final two episodes (and third 'final' final, straight-to-DVD episode). If you're watching it on TV these days, every single episode has Kikuchi's retrofit score. And if you're like me, and watching it on Funimation's releases, episode 1 through 52 has Yamamoto, and 53 through 98 have Kikuchi... because Funi had already mastered those episodes on DVD/Bluray before Toei told them to make the switch. (And they're too lazy to make new masters, I guess.) I'll review them separately, since they deserve as much.
If you watched Dragon Ball Kai as it was airing in Japan, episodes 1 through 95 had the Yamamoto score, only for the Kikuchi replacement to end the series final two episodes (and third 'final' final, straight-to-DVD episode). If you're watching it on TV these days, every single episode has Kikuchi's retrofit score. And if you're like me, and watching it on Funimation's releases, episode 1 through 52 has Yamamoto, and 53 through 98 have Kikuchi... because Funi had already mastered those episodes on DVD/Bluray before Toei told them to make the switch. (And they're too lazy to make new masters, I guess.) I'll review them separately, since they deserve as much.
Kenji Yamamoto's score: I like a lot of Yamamoto's work on DB and other projects throughout the years, even if very much of it is stolen from more talented people. So I won't judge it on that, at least not in this review. His music is good. There's some really good pieces in it. Compared to Tokunaga's GT OST, and certain American composers cracks at Dragon Ball music, Yamamoto seems to have a much better grasp on how to make Dragon Ball sound. That said, there isn't a lot of variety in his themes, with it all boiling down to Epic Orchestral Theme 1, Epic Orchestral Theme 2, and so on. The mysticism and old world sense of adventure brought by Kikuchi is instead replaced with something that isn't bad, but isn't terribly unique either. So instead of Dragon Ball standing apart because of its music, Yamamoto makes it sound the same as any other show.
Shunsuke Kikuchi retrofit score: Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z have a very organic, evolving sound that takes place over their combined 444 episodes. The Kikuchi replacement score for Kai just kind of scopes up a handful of tracks from the back half of DBZ and drops them in at random places, without too much concern for the leitmotif. I say without 'too much', as Cell and Vegeta's themes are still often given over to them... but then often randomly to other characters. That said, despite it having less variety than Kikuchi's work in DBZ, Kikuchi Kai still manages to sound less samey and vanilla than Yamamoto Kai. And after hearing for years that Kikuchi couldn't be played on modern American TV because it was 'too dated', hearing Chris Sabat's irritating Piccolo gab about whatever while Dragon Ball's one true soundtrack plays beneath it on TV these days makes me feel a strong sense of vindication... no matter how weird the circumstances.
Vocal Songs: This is Dragon Ball Kai's biggest musical strength. While the lack of Hironobu Kageyama singing about having an empty head to fill up with dreams is a bummer, Dragon Soul is a great, fist-pumpingly good jam. And while it isn't Kageyama singing about spirit vs spirit as Kuko provides backing tracks, getting to hear Vegeta sing his own fucking theme song seems like the most wonderfully obvious move. With the exception of the second Ending Theme, all the Kai vocal tracks are great. TOKUSENTAI! TOKUSENTAI! TOKUSENTAI! TOKUSENTAI!!!
Pacing Remastered
The biggest selling point for Dragon Ball Kai was the advertised return to "Akira Toriyama's Original Manga"! The reality is quite different. If Dragon Ball Kai had been a completely new animation, it could have achieved this goal. But as it was made up of Dragon Ball Z's recycled animation, the production team was left to cut and paste different filler scenarios, and occasionally axe canon moments, all to make things fit. It can seem random, at first glance. Why leave in Gregory, for example? Kaio-sama's cricket friend is an anime-only character, after all. But he's in nearly every scene with Kaio-sama from the moment he's introduced til the end of the show. He's as ubiquitous as Bubbles. Now when you look at other kept filler moments, like Ginyu taking Bulma's body, or the Z Team helping Gohan fight Cell, you suddenly see these weren't creative liberties taken in their so-called Manga-cut... they didn't have a choice. (Square peg, meet round hole.)
Beyond that, by cutting multiple episodes together, you lose the original arc and flow of the episodes. Sometimes, Kai episodes take on their own new tone, and work really well, with every piece falling neatly into place. But most of the time, it feels like a Frankenstein's Monster, made up of longer but better Dragon Ball Z episodes. While it is nice to lose some of the noodling around to fill time (like basically every time Maron is around), the positives don't outweigh the negatives.
Conclusion
Dragon Ball Kai is trying to be two different things: 1) An HD upscale of Dragon Ball Z. 2) A reboot of the original TV series for a new generation of fans. It fails on both counts, though does the latter decidedly better than it does the former. But lest you give it too much credit as a show for new fans, remember that it was canceled a whole storyline before the end, and was only put back on TV (Dragon Ball Kai 2014, review pending) because the show they replaced it with did worse. If you got into Dragon Ball because of Kai, great! Now you know you can watch something better.
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