I don’t know about these. They look like something out of an alternate reality Dragon Ball comic; something I might read, but certainly nothing that could believably pass as the original characters. It may just be the fact that they seem way too… “movie-fied.”
The Chi-chi model gets props for retaining some semblance to her namesake, but the downside is that she’s built and dressed like a brawler. Not that she hasn’t exhibited any violent qualities in the past, but I think we can all agree fighting isn’t exactly her
modus operandi. Were we really meant to believe that she would go from looking like
that, to becoming the overbearing mother of Gohan who wants nothing more for him than to become a white-collared perfectionist? Even forgoing that misstep, the outfit would have benefited more from being left alone. It seems rather tasteless to have traditional Japanese-style garb devolve into midriff-exposing leather straps. If you’re going for the
Street Fighter physiognomy anyway, why not simply let her look like Chun-Li?
Poor Piccolo suffers from an extremely literal interpretation of who his character is supposed to be: a king and an alien; meanwhile he stands (rather uncomfortably, one might assume) bereft of all the Namekian idiosyncrasies that set him apart from the plethora of extraterrestrial green men in fiction; distinct as they are that I can only describe them as “the fleshy patches,” “biological wristbands” and “those groove things.” Still, he’s greener than Marsters, and at least he has a proper cape (not a fucking
hooded cloak made of… embroidered leather?).
Mai (or whomever that’s supposed to be) looks like a
Matrix-reject. It seems even from an early stage her subdued appearance was to be discarded in favor of amping up the sex appeal. Though, I probably would have appreciated the punk chic better than “leotard-clad ninja with conveniently-emphasized cleavage.” Not that I’m gay, man, but sexuality doesn’t always have to be such a loud cliché.
And this Goku honestly strikes me as if Jet Li dressed himself drunk one morning and decided to go trekking. Honestly. The general
idea is right, but the implementation is all wrong. I can’t tell if his sleeves are rolled up or if they thought adding bulbous rings to a martial arts uniform would somehow benefit the wearer in combat.
For reasons unclear to me, it is characteristic of Hollywood to want to approach adaptations as more
reinventions than anything else, as if they must literally do away with every familiar aspect of the source material and build it up from scratch. My guess is it’s a combination of entitlement—after all, they bought the rights, so the property is naturally “theirs”—a warped, statistics-driven view of “what the public wants,” and unfamiliarity with and/or disinterest in the subject matter. I mean, I’m not knocking the creative process here; nobody wants a Xerox-copy of “Dragon Ball: The Manga” printed in 35mm format, as I hope we’ve established by now. It’s just that, these deviations don’t seem to serve any other purpose than simply to deviate.
If you laud the current changes and lament these early sketches, I don’t really know what to say. They seem to be about on-par with each other in terms of dissimilarity with the canon. I bet you anything if what we have now was down on paper and something else was on film, we’d be witnessing the same uniform indisposition toward their likenesses.
EDIT: Kendamu wrote:I figured that the drawing of the chick with the purple hair was Bulma.
Oh Kami… the most characteristic feature of Bulma, staring a bunch of fans right in the face, and yet it still goes unrecognized. If
that doesn’t say something about the job they’re doing, then I don’t know what does.
Sad I know, but it's pretty cool.
