The Dragonball Movie

It seems that Japan has not yet finished bombarding the United States with bad anime such as Pokémon and the abominable One Piece. Somewhere along the lines a Hollywood producer got the bright idea that a Dragonball movie might be a good way to make money.

For those not familiar with the Dragonball series, the storyline centers around a series of martial arts style fighters who scour the world looking for seven dragon balls. When one person has all seven dragon balls assembled, he may make one wish. Once the person makes a wish the balls are once again scattered across the world and the process starts all over again.

For many people, Dragon Ball is simply campy fun, but the wisdom of making a live action movie is lost on me. Although I will exercise my option as a consumer not to see a Dragonball movie, it probably would have been cheaper and just as successful to release a feature length animated film. Perhaps the fact that such films are not usually marketed to adults made the Hollywood producers decide to go through the hassle of casting and deciding how to do many of the special effects that the movie would require.

Film maker James Wong expects the film to be released sometime in August 2008. Sadly, should I somehow be forced to see this movie adaptation of the manga, it will fill all the things I expect from a summer blockbuster. It will be entertaining-action packed, and little to no need for a human to write any of the elements of the script. It will also mean should some of my younger relatives find out about the planned Dragonball movie they simply will not shut up about it no matter how often an adult wishes them to do so.

This is the case where I wish the producers of the film a great deal of luck and wish them success. Just because I found very little in the mangas that was worthwhile, does not mean that other people have not. And of course there are people who enjoy the bad, campy, martial arts style action of the film simply because it is bad, campy, martial arts style action. I just hope by some miracle I will have no exposure at all to the film which will probably be lumped in with films such as the Marvel comic book films series in the minds of many movie goers, at least in the minds of movie goers who have no other interest in anime.