Dragon Ball: The Path to Power

Goku meets Bulma, they go after the dragon balls and run into the Red Ribbon Army. The story takes the events at the very start of the series and retells them: training with Kame Sennin, the assault on the Red Ribbon tower and Goku's first great test. The film is not interested in a new story. It is interested in redrawing the beginning: made for Dragon Ball's tenth anniversary, it compresses the earliest chapters and reproduces them at the animation quality of the day. This is a celebration rather than a continuation. The form is nineties Toei animation: bright colours, fluid fight scenes and drawing noticeably above the television episodes. Shigeyasu Yamauchi directed. It runs about eighty minutes, and because the plot is accelerated a great deal of the manga is skipped. Masako Nozawa voices Goku and Hiromi Tsuru voices Bulma. Nozawa has voiced Goku since the first episode. Who it is for: people who know the series and like nineties animation. Who it is not for: anyone meeting the story for the first time. The film passes through too many events too quickly and the characters' development disappears.