Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero Director Breaks Silence on Directing Dragon Ball's First CG Movie

By Kofi Outlaw

The upcoming Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero movie has already sparked controversy with a lot of fans, since it will be the first Dragon Ball movie to use CG animation as part of its aesthetic design. Anime's relationship with CGI has always been particularly rocky, as traditionalists feel that hand-drawn imagery is a core component of manga and/or anime. So why has Toei Animation decided to finally change the format of Dragon Ball? The director of Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero is breaking his silence to address directing Dragon Ball's first CG movie: 

During a recent stage panel for Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero, director Tetsuro Kodama openly addressed stepping into the breach as the director of Dragon Ball's first CG animated movie, and the backlash that comes with the job: "Well, in my case, I don't know exactly what it is, but a feeling of pressure maybe? Personally, I'm not the type of person who has that kind of feeling, however, my eyes have been twitching a little lately."

Kodama went to laugh off the comment about the pressure of the job, before addressing the reasoning behind using CG animation in Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero – and how it can help the franchise march into the future:

"We also grew up right in the middle of the Shonen Jump Dragon Ball generation and since then, the fandom has just gotten bigger and bigger to become this huge phenomenon. But we have a mission to break new ground and help cultivate new fans. So what type and style of animation would help to achieve that goal? That's where this project got started."

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(Photo: Toei Animation)

Change is never an easy thing, and anime fans have been given plenty of good reasons in the past to be wary of CG animation's use in the genre. That all said, we've recently seen good evidence of what can result from giving Dragon Ball a stylistic makeover: the previous movie, Dragon Ball Super: Broly re-designed the animated characters of the series from the ground up under the leadership of animation director Naohiro Shintani – and now a lot of fans want "Shintani style" to be THE new style of Dragon Ball. So, perhaps Tetsuro Kodama and his team could potentially achieve the same feat with Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero? The possibility is there. 

Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero hits Japanese theaters in April. It will open in US theaters later in 2022. 

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