Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero (2022)

The twenty-first animated entry in a franchise that has now outlived several of its own antagonists, Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero arrives as a machine built for a single purpose: reminding the faithful why they once cared. Piccolo and Gohan take the lead, the Red Ribbon Army returns in corporate drag, and the whole affair unfolds with the smooth confidence of a product that knows its audience down to the last ticket stub. As a piece of cultural messaging, it is nearly inert. The film has no thesis, no sermon, and no interest in the anxieties of its moment.

The few grace notes are incidental. Pan, a small child with a large forehead and larger ambitions, learns to fly and lands a blow on a henchman, and Bulma and Android 18 do join the melee. This is participation, not argument. Any faint stirring of empowerment is promptly undercut by Bulma spending her dragon wishes on a butt lift and longer eyelashes, a gag the film treats with the reverence of a sitcom punchline. Elsewhere the cupboard is bare: no racial reckoning, no climate anxiety, no queer text, no body-positive sermon. The Red Ribbon Army has rebranded as a pharmaceutical company, which sounds like a critique of late capitalism until we remember that every cartoon villain since 1963 has owned a corporation.

Dr. Hedo, a grave-robbing mad scientist with a superhero fixation, is an archetype, not a diagnosis, and the film offers no vocabulary for neurodivergence. History is not revised so much as reissued. Nothing here lectures. It punches, it transforms, it sells tickets, and it goes home. A weary verdict: harmless, efficient, and almost entirely innocent of the culture wars it will inevitably be drafted into.