Welcome to the first Dragon Ball Heroes animation brea kdown!
10 years ago, Bandai were desperate for a Heroes anime, and instead we got Dragon Ball
Kai.
A decade later and one finally exists, though probably not on quite the same scale that
they wanted.
And scale is exactly what I want to kick things off with today because I think it's important
to understand what expectations to have with this format.
Excluding the credits and the opening, which is literally just a repurposed Heroes commercial,
there is about 6 minutes of content here.
This is a promotional anime – it is, for all intents and purposes, essentially an extended
version of the Heroes commercials we've been getting for the past 10 years.
Like I mentioned in my breakdown of the character designs the other day, this is not going to
be exceptional in any way.
This is very much, and I use this term correctly, a low budget, small scale advert.
I think the key animation list says it all, really.
There are only two key animators here, and the one who is at the top of that list, and
handles essentially 80% of the animation here is Yukihiro Kitano.
For those who don't remember or are maybe new to the channel, Yukihiro Kitano was one
of the absolute worst supervisors on Dragon Ball Super.
He was responsible for the ghastly episode 24 with Goku vs Freeza, the hugely disappointing
episode 62 with Super Saiyan Rage Trunks, and he was so poor in fact that he was demoted
once the series hit the Tournament of the Power.
However, in the animation supervisor and storyboard role, we have the series' character designer
Tadayoshi Yamamuro at the helm.
Yamamuro's approach to supervision is a bit of a double-edged sword.
He is infamous for entirely redrawing anything put in front of him to his style.
That is a fantastic thing when you have very poor animators, but of course when you put
good animators with very distinct traits in front of him, they're often erased with
their interesting idiosyncrasies reduced or wiped away entirely.
Thankfully, with Kitano here, you know that you're getting nothing but an upgrade with
Yamamuro's corrections.
You guys are well aware that I'm not a big fan of Yamamuro's modern style, but he's
generally a competent artist, and he's very fast.
As a result, regardless of whether I like this style or not, it would be an outright
lie to say the art is anything other than consistent and polished from start to finish.
So with that aspect acknowledged, let's look at this key animation.
Kicking things off, we have the only other key animator here, Jin Inaba.
He essentially sandwiches Kitano's work here, as you'll see.
Inaba was a staple of the Super series, and was actually pretty decent, particularly with
17's punch in episode 121.
The work here is understandably nowhere near that level.
This is about as rudimentary as it gets on the whole, but I do quite like the way he
conveyed Whis' effortless dodging of Goku and Vegeta's attacks.
He's using timing that makes his movements feel very floaty, and that's pretty effective
for what's being conveyed here.
On the flipside, Yamamuro's storyboard is pretty bad, it showcases essentially everything
I pointed out in the preview breakdown, and it's far and away the weakest aspect of
the short episode.
From shot to shot, this is pretty much Resurrection F 2.0.
It is flat composition on flat composition, interspersed by characters stood on the edge
of the frame, and Yamamuro's limited bank of shot choices are plain to see – he absolutely
loves to frame things between people's legs.
I'm sure you'll remember me pointing out how he constantly has characters raising their
fists too.
On one hand, this is an extended commercial, it doesn't really matter, but on the other,
on something of this scale, you aren't going to have much in the way of exemplary animation,
so you should be making up for that with interesting boards.
There are some choice moments towards the end that I like, but by and large, this is
about as rudimentary as it gets.
Moving on, let's talk about Kitano because he's actually the strongest part of this
episode by a mile.
Since there's very little movement here, Kitano makes up for this by going really heavy
with his effects.
I have said many times in the past that in spite of his issues with actual animation,
I really do like the shapes he uses in his smoke and explosions.
From the moment the two Gokus clash, you get this eruption of shaggy looking smoke, with
these quite angular shadows.
My favourite section has to be where Goku dodges Xeno Goku's blast.
I really like the way he's animated Goku kind of easing up and down, and the explosion
in the cliff is pretty competent.
I'm a big fan of homogenous billows with interesting highlight shapes, so this is right
up my alley.
The scuffle that follows is equally as strong for similar reasons.
The movement itself has the awkward posing that Kitano's so well known for, but again
the effects are carrying these scenes far beyond what they really deserve.
The big explosion reminds me a lot of Miuma's scene from episode 86 of Super, albeit with
far less interesting shapes.
As I mentioned in the preview breakdown, this Kamehameha is honestly so poor.
There's absolutely no weight behind any of these actions, and combined with the miniaturising
composition, this is for me the weakest section of the episode.
At the very least, the aftermath does give us another glimpse at Kitano's reasonably
pleasant effects.
A long stretch of bland dialogue scenes later, and Jin Inaba comes back in to close things
up with some lightning effects that are pretty much 1 to 1 with the #17 scene I mentioned
earlier.
This is also one of the few spots where the director's touch comes into play.
This episode is directed by Ryo Nanba, and you would easily be forgiven for not knowing
who that is.
Nanba began on Super as an Assistant Production Manager – he was in charge of planning until
around episode 68.
Later down the line, he became an assistant director, and now he's directing his very
own… very short episode.
He's created a bit of an atmosphere for this prison planet, but otherwise there's
nothing particularly standout.
As a little side-note, they are in fact using the filter from the Universe Survival arc,
and you can see it's been turned up to 11 since we are on non-Earth worlds, and that
was pretty much the standard in Super, too.
The next episode is in two weeks, and it is looking to be pretty much the same quality.
I think this is very much what we can expect from this Heroes anime.
The same stock poses we've seen for decades, rudimentary animation, polished up by competently
drawn, but questionable designs.
This is the Nickelback of Dragon Ball – it is bland, it is by the numbers, people like
to exaggerate how bad it is, but some of us secretly do enjoy the odd thing here and there.
To be perfectly honest, this is pretty much the perfect place for a modern Yamamuro.
He gets to keep phoning it in and it doesn't matter because it does the job.
It sells what it's meant to be selling, it looks good to children, and it has no pretence
of being anything more than that.
At the same time, I'm gonna keep breaking this down with full honesty, but keep in mind
that that doesn't mean that I'm not enjoying it, or that you can't enjoy it.
Like I said, it's doing its bare minimum, and that's absolutely fine for what this
is.
If this were a movie or a TV show, then I would absolutely condemn it, but for a glorified
commercial, it's just… fine.
And that is all I have to say, so thank you so much for listening.
Let me know down below how you felt about this first Heroes episode.
Be sure to rate this video if you got something from it – your ratings really did help my
video from the other day.
Subscribe if you're new, and I will see you next time.
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