Post
by Gaffer Tape » Wed Aug 01, 2018 12:26 pm
I've been fortunate enough to be able to express my opinions on Minus in posts, in videos, and even in Kanzenshuu's own DB 30th Anniversary magazine, so I do run the risk of restating things I've been saying for four years. Suffice it to say, I don't like it. I think it's a complete travesty, and the best part, from a critical standpoint, is that you can easily find fault with it from so many angles. It almost sounds perverse to say, but it's almost exciting in how many ways it fails because there are so many opportunities to find "this is what not to do when telling a story" lessons.
But I'm not here for that today. What's been fascinating me of late is using "it's just a short bonus chapter, so how can you expect anything good from it?" as a defense. That kind of mentality bothers me, both because it's not really a defense so much as damning with faint praise, and because it's addressing people's criticisms by deflecting the subject away from the criticisms and rendering any further criticisms invalid by this loophole. It's not as good as it could be because it's not long enough to tell its story, but it's not fair to criticize it for that because it's not long enough to tell its story. It's basically a circular argument.
Let's look at Trunks: The Story, Toriyama's bonus chapter from the '90s, which is basically the antecedent for Dragon Ball Minus. All of the mistakes Toriyama makes in Minus are the same mistakes he had already made here. And then look at The Trunks Special, the anime adaptation of that same chapter. You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who prefers Trunks: The Story over The Trunks Special. And you might be quick to rush to the same defense, that The Trunks Special has more time to tell its story. And that's not untrue. They make great use of the extra time. But The Trunks Special inadvertently reveals what the real problem is. What The Trunks Special does is turn Trunks: The "Story" into an actual story. Because it wasn't, despite the name. It was just a collection of background events that we already knew: Gohan trained Trunks, Gohan was killed, Trunks uses a time machine. All Trunks: The Story does is take those background elements and draw them onto a page. Doing that, and putting the word "Story" into your title, does not automatically turn it into a story. It's a novelty getting to see younger Trunks and Future Gohan. It's a fanservicey window into a terrible future. But it does not stand alone as a story. As a properly-utilized flashback in a chapter of Dragon Ball, it might have worked to supplement a narrative thread there. But it doesn't work as a story on its own, which is how it is presented.
The Trunks Special, however, does take that and turn it into its own story. By exploring that world in greater detail and tweaking some specifics, they're able to focus those elements into a character arc for Trunks. It's a journey for him, one that demonstrates how he becomes the person we see in the main series. He breaks away from the safety net of his mother, crossing the threshold into danger and adulthood. As one of the last people with the potential to become a Super Saiyan, he has a great responsibility thrust onto him but struggles to reach that potential. He finally does but only a great cost. Then he has to deal with his own hubris and desire for revenge, to finally understand just how over his head he is, to become humble enough to reach out to those who might be able to help him. None of that is present in Trunks: The Story. The kernels of the final point are kinda there but sped through so much that it's not even remotely effective. The Trunks Special, like The Bardock Special before it, takes us on the journey of a character finding himself, learning, growing, and failing. Trunks: The Story just regurgitates plot points we already knew that lead to an inevitable conclusion: Trunks travels back to the past, so here a few things that happened before that.
And those are the same sins that Minus commits. It's not interested in telling a story. There is no story. There are simply bullet points of backstory drawn for our convenience. There are no characters. There is no progression. There is no point. While it does "reveal" a few things we certainly didn't know, it's nothing that's really important to Dragon Ball's story, and it's not anything that's given the opportunity to be fleshed out enough to be interesting on its own. Who is Bardock? I don't know. I don't spend enough time with him. Who is Gine? I don't know. I don't spend enough time with her. What is it about Bardock that makes him the only Saiyan capable of figuring out what Freeza's up to? Is he smarter than the average Saiyan? Are all the other Saiyans dumb? I don't know. There's no chance to explore it. We don't have time to think about that. We have to make a mad dash for the ending here.
I'm sure you're all saying that proves your point. The Trunks Special has an unfair advantage in extra time. Dragon Ball Minus just doesn't have enough page space to fully explore these concepts. And you'd be right. But that's not an excuse. When you use a medium that is not suited to telling the story you want to tell, that doesn't give you a free pass to tell that story badly. That's just setting yourself up for failure. Pretty much any medium is capable of telling a compelling story. But it has to be the right story for the medium. Hell, newspaper comic strips are intended to do that in three panels! But if you tried to tell The Lord of the Rings in three panels, I daresay you'd be hard pressed to make it work. It is far too complex to engagingly tell that story in that medium. Now, of course, there are serialized comic strips. It's not really a format I care for to tell that kind of story, but even they're not trying to tell it in three panels. They're telling it over the course of months, years. Because for all the protestations of "This is only 15 pages!" coming from DB Minus defenders, all of Dragon Ball is in the 15-page format. Toriyama just never typically tried to tell a complete story in 15 pages. Because that would be ridiculous. Why does this get a pass for trying to cram an epic story of betrayal and resistance and establishing two completely unknown characters into 15 pages? Even the first chapter of Dragon Ball, which was only the introduction to a story but still had to establish two characters and the concept of the Dragon Balls, was given twice as much room as this. Hell, even Jaco, which is a comparatively smaller, more intimate story, was given ten times the space as this. As if the deck wasn't stacked against it already, Dragon Ball Minus wastes about four pages just showing fanservice and wasting time. It cuts to Freeza, not to explore his motivations, his fears, or anything like that, but just so he can exposit that he is indeed going to destroy Planet Vegeta, and so he can name drop Super Saiyan God. It cuts away to Raditz and Vegeta just so we can know what they look like as kids. It cuts away to Jaco, just so we can see that Jaco is assigned to go to earth, which we presumably already know because we just got done reading his story! I'm not saying that even that would have been enough space to really flesh out the attempt at story here, but it certainly would have helped. This needed focus to even have a prayer at developing anything engaging. But not only did it not have nearly the space it needed to tell that story, it couldn't even effectively use the space it had!
I'm a fan of silent films. And recently, I got to see the seminal Harold Lloyd comedy Safety Last! in theatres. It was a fantastic experience and reminded me just how effectively you can tell a story even if you don't have any audible dialogue. It's almost exclusively visual humor, visual storytelling, visual characterization, with just a few intertitles and personal letters to convey dialogue when necessary. A couple of days later, I watched Pulp Fiction. If you've seen that movie, you know that it is primarily dialogue. It is witty banter, characterization through verbal interaction. Just imagine trying to make Pulp Fiction into a silent film. Oh, there are definitely ways you could do it. You could present it exactly the same way and just present all the dialogue as intertitles. And then you'd have the most boring movie in existence, and you'd make it about five hours long. All of that energy present in seeing two fantastic actors verbally sparring with each other would be reduced to watching two people sitting in a booth for minutes on end never moving, silently flapping their gums, and then cutting to a black screen with words every thirty seconds to find out what it is they said. You probably could tell a similar story silently, but it would require huge amounts of reworking to present the same kinds of characterization in a way that is both visually interesting and capable of being understood with limited dialogue. And that's a huge, huge change to make a story like that and would require an exceptional amount of talent and care. In other words, the first example completely misses the expectations and limitations of the medium and tries to force a story that doesn't fit into that box. And the result is a disaster.
So I agree with all of you who say that you can't expect the same kind of detailed, epic story Dragon Ball usually tells in 15 pages. I just wish somebody had told Toriyama that, so he wouldn't have pushed along with it anyway, with predictable results.
alien parents send a baby to earth in a pod (who later becomes it's hero) to protect from oncoming doom, then die along with the planet. That sh*t doesnt happen just on accident. But I mean future Trunks was inspired by Terminator, so who am I to judge lol
