Anime's are a worldwide phenomenon. There will always be a huge fanbase behind every anime series. As for me, I've been a fan of Dragon Ball/Z/Super series'; Yu-Gi-Oh!: Duel Monsters and Pokemon.
The downside to this massive fanbases is that movie productions will always try and take advantage of this and make live action movies. For the most part, it backfires in a spectacular fashion. Critics dismantle it piece by piece and the company loses millions as a result of the anger and backlash from the respective fans.
A prime example is that of Dragonball: Evolution. The plot was based on the magna storyline in the Dragon Ball era where Goku must go face-to-face with Piccolo.
Many live-action anime adaptations have left audiences disappointed. Dragonball Evolution is often touted as the worst offender. The movie not only misinterpreted the original anime and manga but even whitewashed almost the entire cast and re-imagined the story as a coming-of-age drama set in a high school. To make things even worse, the movie couldn't even get the name of its source material right.
It spelled "dragon ball" as one single word in its title, which was the first telltale sign of how disastrous it was going to be.
Dragon Ball is such a popular anime franchise that it makes total sense that a studio would attempt a live-action American adaptation that takes advantage of the anime's success. Although live-action anime adaptations have significantly improved in the past decade, with Netflix's One Piece being one of the best examples; competent live-action anime films were still few and far between in 2009 when Dragonball Evolution was released.
Dragonball Evolution wasn't just a colossal misfire and box office failure; it's often cited as one of the worst anime adaptations of all-time and a film that actually damaged the Dragon Ball brand.
Dragonball Evolution had many of the right ingredients to be a success, including Chow Yun-fat's casting as Master Roshi, Stephen Chow producing and James Wong in the director's chair.
Nevertheless, Dragonball Evolution completely fails to capture the series’ spirit. Despite its poor reception, Dragonball Evolution actually led to some surprising offshoots, including a trilogy of novels.
Live-action anime adaptations, particularly English ones, are set up to fail in many respects. There was a tendency to Americanise these properties in attempts to make them more palatable, yet these clunky endeavors were rarely successful. Dragonball Evolution is especially egregious in this regard when it makes Goku an 18-year-old high school student who struggles with bullies.
The film goes so far in its attempts to Americanise and modernise Dragon Ball that it fundamentally changes important aspects of Goku's character. It also doesn't help that Dragonball Evolution tries to cram far too much into an 85-minute movie and still ultimately doesn't cover a satisfying amount of Dragon Ball's story.
The film is forced to haphazardly cobble together a handful of events and characters that often just reflect their Dragon Ball counterparts in name alone.
On top of everything else, Dragon Ball is just a hard property to bring to life in live-action even when it’s done by the most competent of filmmakers. It’s an anime that’s full of hyperbolised powers, attacks and characters.
Goku’s hair alone is a feat to properly pull off and Bulma’s single streak of blue hair in Dragonball Evolution perfectly encapsulates how far off course it goes with its adaptation efforts.
There were lofty aspirations for Dragonball Evolution, which was meant to be the first part in a trilogy that would have done its best to depict some of the franchise’s most important sagas. These sequels did not come to pass and Dragonball Evolution has largely been scrubbed from the public consciousness.
In fact, it’s likely to never be adapted again into live-action because of Dragonball Evolution’s failure. Surprisingly, Dragon Ball Evolution’s universe would still be able to grow a little bigger with additional companion pieces.
20th Century Fox certainly wasn't planning for Dragon Ball Evolution to be a failure and some of its expanded efforts were too late in production to cancel. Dragonball Evolution produced more generic ancillary additions like Dragon Ball Evolution: Sticker Book and Dragon Ball Evolution: Posterzine, which featured stickers, posters, cast interviews and merchandise showcases. However, a series of novels were also produced that attempted something a little more ambitious.
Dragon Ball Evolution: The Junior Novel, was released by Viz Media and written by Stacia Deutsch and Rhody Cohon. The Junior Novel adapts the entire movie and is geared towards readers who are between 8–15. Additionally, a trilogy of chapter books were also released that were aimed at readers 7-10.
These three novels, Dragon Ball Evolution: The Movie Chapter Book, Vol. 1: The Discovery, Vol. 2: The Search, and Vol. 3: The Battle, are only around 70 pages each, but collectively recap the movie.
This trilogy of chapter books doesn’t really take many liberties and go beyond the film’s source material. That being said, it’s still interesting to see Dragon Ball depicted as a novel in written prose. Many anime franchises have light novels and novels that are incorporated into their anime adaptations or explore completely original stories. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure has a lot of fun with the direction of its novels. There are also English Sailor Moon novels that cover the first season’s events.
Dragon Ball hasn’t received the novelisation treatment in Japan, which makes these Dragonball Evolution companion novels fascinating artifacts. The closest that Dragon Ball ever got to novels or light novels is a trilogy of short stories that were released – with pictures – that focused on Piccolo, Vegeta and Future Trunks. It’s a rare area in which Dragonball Evolution helped set a precedent for the franchise.
Dragonball Evolution also managed to receive a video game adaptation for the PlayStation Portable that's ostensibly a lost entry in the Budokai fighting franchise. Dragon Ball Evolution: The Game was developed by Dimps and uses the Shin Budokai engine.
The live-action character models are very ugly but the gameplay is actually decent. There's also a fascinating roster that includes unusual characters like Bulma, Chi-Chi, Mai and Grandpa Gohan; but also characters who are original to the movie, like the monstrous Fu-Lum and Neo Piccolo.
It took a long time for Dragon Ball’s image to recover from Dragon Ball Evolution. Akira Toriyama himself was also feeling disenfranchised over the franchise’s reputation, and it was Dragon Ball Evolution’s damage that ultimately pushed him to get more involved in Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods’ production.
Battle of Gods was always going to happen but Toriyama’s role became much more active as he became interested in Dragon Ball’s redemption.
Toriyama’s experience on Battle of Gods would trigger an even greater role in its sequel, Resurrection ‘F.’ These films became Dragon Ball Super’s foundation, which Toriyama continued to mastermind until his death in 2024. It’s entirely possible that Dragon Ball Super would've never come to fruition if not for Dragonball Evolution pushing the series to rock bottom and demanding a resuscitative return.
Despite the failure, it's also the only reason Dragon Ball Super exists. Were it not for the complete failure of this film and the countless ways in which it serves as an outright insult to Dragon Ball, Toriyama never would have been inspired to create Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods and revive the franchise in the process.
For as much as Dragonball Evolution fails as a movie, and fails even worse as an adaptation of the most legendary anime of all time, it's also bizarrely one of the most influential films of the 2000s.
Dragon Ball has come back in a massive way in the 2010s and 2020s, and Dragon Ball Super, Dragon Ball DAIMA and all other new anime, manga and film additions to the franchise only exist because of Dragonball Evolution.
The negative backlash to Dragonball Evolution in 2009 was swift and massive. Among the film's countless haters was Akira Toriyama himself, who was repulsed at how the work that defined his career had been warped and presented to mainstream audiences in theaters around the world.
This was what inspired Toriyama to make his own theatrical Dragon Ball movie, Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods, so he could remind everyone what the franchise was supposed to be.
When Battle of Gods was made, it was very much intended to be a standalone film, not the beginning of a new era of Dragon Ball. With how successful it proved to be, it naturally got a sequel, Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection 'F', the even bigger success of which led to the creation of Dragon Ball Super and, as they say, the rest is history.
Had Dragonball Evolution not been such a disgrace, the worlds of anime, manga and even video games would look completely different. Shocking as this may seem, what's even more interesting is how all of this modern Dragon Ball material reflects back on Dragonball Evolution.
Evolution was panned as a badly made insult to Dragon Ball with bland, cookie-cutter storytelling, but this description can just as easily apply to Resurrection 'F', the worst arcs of Dragon Ball Super, the back-half of Dragon Ball DAIMA and especially to Super Dragon Ball Heroes. Unlike all the aforementioned anime, at least Dragonball Evolution is entertaining to sit back with friends and laugh at ironically.
With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to look back on Dragonball Evolution with an odd sense of fondness. No longer is it an insult to a completed, iconic work of fiction but a hilarious, fun-to-watch bad movie that single-handedly revived a dormant franchise and that genuinely has more merit than several arcs of the anime that it helped spawn. Dragonball Evolution may be a reviled failure, but it's a reviled failure with charm and historical significance.
Live-action is likely territory that Dragon Ball will continue to avoid. However, there are still interesting relics and ideas from Dragonball Evolution, like companion novels and video game characters, that deserve deeper consideration.
Dragonball Evolution has been mocked and critically torn to shreds for nearly two decades, with few people willing to even try and defend it. Both as a film and as an adaptation of the Dragonball anime, the consensus among fans and general audiences alike is that it has few to none redeeming values and a stain on the franchise as a whole. It has a 14% score on Rotten Tomatoes, a 2.5 on IMDb and a 0.9 on Letterboxd.
Rather than even attempting to be a Dragon Ball Z movie, as most fans, especially those in America, would've wanted, Dragonball Evolution instead serves as an extremely loose adaptation of the Pilaf and King Piccolo Sagas of the original Dragon Ball. Sadly, the film fails to capture any of what makes these arcs great, as it attempts to force a largely humorous and irreverent Japanese story into the mold of a cookie-cutter American action movie.
I have never seen the movie and I never will. Live-action anime movies should be barred from being made. It'll always be doomed from day one of production. Anime should be left alone and not interfered with.
One good thing did come out of this mess. The movies and Super series really ignited interest in the magna and possibly got more fans of the anime. I'm sure I was one of many who got excited by the new content.