‘Dragon Ball Super’ Movie Reveals New Piccolo, Whis and Beerus Designs

The Dragon Ball Super movie is finally giving fans some new and exciting things to look at, as a new promo for the film has revealed the new designs for several major Dragon Ball Super characters that will be appearing in the movie.

We’ve previously broken down just how Goku will look and fight differently, and what subtle tweaks have been done to Vegeta’s look for the film – now let’s discuss the look of some the other characters in the promo – namely, Piccolo, Beerus and Whis!

As you can see above, Piccolo’s look is probably the most consistent between the Dragon Ball Super anime and movie designs; the Namekian hero pretty much looks the same! The same could be said for Whis, as the flamboyant angel’s design is still largely the same, as it tends to be across different platforms (like Dragon Ball Super or the Dragon Ball Heroes video game). If anything, this version of Whis is lankier, and his robes are much slimmer at the bottom in this pic than the more billowed look of the anime.

That brings us to the biggest design change in this promo artwork: Beerus. This Dragon Ball Super movie will give Beerus the Thanos treatment – i.e., altering the coloration of Universe 7’s God of Destruction in a big way. Knowing the Dragon Ball fandom (and the anime fandom in general), the coloration of Beerus will likely become a heated debate.

Dragon Ball Super: The Movie’s characters and story design have all been overseen and/or approved by series creator Akira Toriyama; that fact will fuel a lot of the more harcore purists fans, who will argue that whatever changes are being made are the more valid and “authentic” representations of the characters, as they come with Toriyama’s blessing. The same cannot be said of anything that appeared in much of Dragon Ball Super’s run.

Indeed, DBS may be a global smash hit now, but for many of its early years the fandom and even the creative team behind the show were all up in arms, over the shoddy work of showrunner Yukihiro Kitano (in particular). So, figures like Beerus that were introduced in that controversial era definitely have room for revision and refinement; and we already know that these new Dragon Ball Super movie designs may be the new standard for the entire series, going forward.

So… Beerus the gray?

Dragon Ball Super currently airs its English dub on Adult Swim during the Toonami programming block Saturday evenings at 9:30 p.m. It is also available to stream on FunimationNOW and Amazon Video. The Japanese language release of the series is complete, and available to stream on FunimationNOW, VRV, and Crunchyroll.