Dragon Ball Super: Broly

Tatsuya Nagamine directs a screenplay Akira Toriyama wrote himself. Nagamine says he never consulted Toriyama during production, met him only at the private staff screening, treated the script as instruction and trimmed little more than single words from it. Character design was settled by an audition: candidates drew Goku, Vegeta and Bulma, Toriyama chose Naohiro Shintani, and Tadayoshi Yamamuro, the designer attached to the series for years, was set aside. Most of the drawings Toriyama corrected were of the female characters, and the bodies he asked for were slimmer than the older anime style. The opening starts decades before the present: the infant Broly is exiled from Planet Vegeta, and Bardock sends his son to Earth. The fight begins only once that history is laid down, and then barely stops. Nagamine changed the battle’s setting on purpose, because energy blasts would not read against endless white ice, so the scene moves first to magma and then into another dimension. It was nominated for Animation of the Year at the 42nd Japan Academy Film Prize, where Mirai won. A good fit if you treat the retelling of Saiyan history as the real payload and do not mind waiting for the fight. Not for anyone expecting the rage machine Broly of 1993; Toriyama rewrote him as closed off and bewildered.