Dragon Ball GT: A Hero's Legacy Review

This might just be the strangest anime Dragon Ball has ever produced. There's no overarching bad guy, there is no large save the world threat, there is no over the top fights, there is no training. Basically everything you ever assiociated Dragon Ball with especially from King Piccolo Saga and onwards is pretty much not here, and it is easy to bash the movie for that, I do think if you look at it's own merits and as a standalone story, it's surprisingly compelling. It's impressive what they managed to pull off in less than an hour, and it's not your typical DB movie fare of a big bad guy showing up, they fight for 30-40 minutes and it's over, this movie has as much story to it's bone as Wrath of the Dragon did only without the action and large scale stakes.

What makes the movie interesting on it's own is that it feels like a decent kids fairy tale adventure movie and the film is quite comitted to telling that story. Goku Jr. starts off as a scared naive kid but slowly throughout the movie, he starts to stand up for himself and grows a backbone. Sure, none of this is super amazing but for is esstentially "kids fairy tale movie Dragon Ball Edition", this works pretty well. Ironically, Dragon Ball started off as that so this movie in a sense is the story coming full circle. It start on Mount Poazu and it feels rather poetic that Goku Jr. learns about his grandfather on the very same place the DB story started. It surprisingingly feels "grounded" and personal for a Dragon Ball story since it's about Goku Jr. trying to help his dying grandma and it's about Goku Jr. trying to possibly grow up without her. Other positives include Pan being more of an interesting character being someone Goku Jr. aspires to be and Puck was surprisingly well done for a generic bully character, there was more depth to him that I was expecting there to be. Not only that but some of the morals the movie brings to the table like, "don't trust nice people" is rather deep for what is esstentially a story written for kids.

Some negatives is that Puck somehow surviving the fall felt really forced and felt like the movie needed to end on a happy note, and it was never explained how Pan was able to survive her medical problems. The villains were also rather one note too, and they don't have any charisma or overly abusing the worf effect like past DB villains did. I get that the story is not about them but a good villain tends to elevate a story for me.

Overall, for a movie I don't remember much despite renting it from Blockbuster a lot, I found it a lot more interesting than I thought it was going to be. I can even sort of reccomend this movie to those who never liked Dragon Ball at all since it is far removed from everything the series did from King Piccolo and onwards.