Movie Review: Dragon Ball Z - Fusion Reborn

Dragon Ball Z: Fusion Reborn [1995]

So, yeah. This is the twelfth movie for the Dragon Ball franchise, and as popular as some movie villains (mostly just Broly and Cooler, as I understand) are, they are strictly non canon. And, well, I was told that "Fusion Reborn" was one of the newer movies, released while the Majin Buu saga was on air. And... well, the movies' lack of continuity is pretty apparent here. Vegeta's dead and in hell, but Goku's apparently already fought against Majin Buu (he's name-dropped in this movie), and both Gotenks and Super Saiyan 3 are running around in play? I dunno. It's easier to handwave timeline problems away when talking about anime movies, I feel. 

Anyway, Fusion Reborn runs around 50 minutes and it definitely doesn't deserve to run all that long. As a 35 or 40 minute anime special, it probably would've worked better, but the movie spends so damn long with random filler scenes that I honestly considered shutting it off halfway through the movie.

The setup is pretty neat, even if I'm not sure what the Otherworld Tournament is, not having watched the filler arcs of the Dragon Ball Z anime. In any case, that tournament is interrupted with one of the 'evil draining machines' or whatever it's called in King Enma's afterlife sorting station ends up malfunctioning, creating the culmination of all evil in hell, which takes the form of a jolly yellow giant called Janemba that can only speak its name. Goku and another Otherworld Tournament ally, Paikon, shows up to fight Janemba, but barely hold their own, while Janemba distorts the reality of the afterlife/otherworld by creating... giant jelly beans and trapping Enma's castle in a neat distorted dimension.

Meanwhile, on the land of the living, the dead walk the earth as the likes of Dracula and Adolf Hitler (no, really) show up... while Freeza leads an army of dead villain cameos (including a frog Ginyu!) to fight Gohan in his Saiyaman outfit... and get one-punched. The concept of the gates of hell opening and unleashing all past villains is honestly not a bad idea for a movie in and of itself, and it's a shame that other than Gohan one-punching Freeza, everything else that happens in the mortal world is just Goten and Trunks repeating the same several sequences of fighting Adolf Hitler and his not-Nazis. And the animation's pretty suspect too.

Most of the movie is spent alternating between Goku fighting Janemba and cutting off to show Goten and Trunks fighting Hitler, or Paikon shouting insults again and again, and it gets so tiresome at this point. Janemba gets a power up halfway through the movie, turning into a skinny feral form (gee, Majin Buu much?) that actually looks pretty damn cool. Shame that, y'know, his entire dialogue is variations of "EEEEE" and "AAAAAA". And Janemba is honestly the weakest part of the movie. He delivers some really cool visuals, like punches that warp through space (which Dragon Ball Super's Anilaza borrows from), a sword with some cool cuts and best of all, the ability to disintegrate into blocks and recreate himself seconds later, but Janemba's so devoid of any personality and a cool design can only carry you so far. 

Add that to the fact that when Vegeta shows up out of nowhere, we spend some time dicking around with Vegeta tsundere-ing and refusing to fuse, and then some more time where Vegeta and Goku becomes fat Veku... and when they finally do fuse, they transform into Gogeta (not to be confused with Vegito) and just one-shot Janemba. I'm sure the scene would have far more of an impact if the DVD cover doesn't have Gogeta front and center, that they tried to fuse since halfway through the movie, and if we haven't already seen Vegito before (and really, only their clothes are different, right?). I admit that it may be my own personal apathy about fusion in general, though. At the very least, the weird sparkly invisible punch thing that Gogeta uses to kill Janemba is genuinely cool and unexpected. And honestly, it's the flashy fight scenes that really make this movie nowhere as painful to watch.

Apparently this movie was released after Gotenks appeared in the manga, but before Vegito appeared? And Gogeta is original to this movie until he proved (naturally) immensely popular and started showing up in all the games and GT?  Eh. I dunno... it probably feels super-duper-awesome for the people watching at that time, but I just don't particularly see it as being particularly impressive, personally. 

Overall the movie does have its good points, and Janemba's abilities are visually interesting even if he's as flat as a rock, and that scene when Gogeta was fused and when Goku achieves Super Saiyan 3 is pretty impressive... but honestly, it's symptomatic of all the worst parts of anime tie-in movies. A flat villain (that is essentially a personality-less, backstory-less Majin Buu, no less!), a plotline that barely holds together, jack-shit characterization and a power-up that ends up winning the day. Even the fight scenes, beyond brief showing-off of Janemba's wacky powers, which is entertaining, devolve into just punchy-punch and blasty-blast. It's pretty strange because there are some parts of this movie that I immensely enjoy, but a combination of way too much 'comedy' that didn't work and a climax that dragged on and on made me enjoy this movie far less than I probably should.