“Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero” leads the US box office in its opening week; this is what you should know about the story

( ) — Another dragon is making headlines this weekend, and it’s not the one related to House Targaryen. This one comes directly from Japan and in fiction it has much fewer years of history than those described in Westeros: Dragon Ball.

“Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero”, the 21st tape of the Dragon Ball universe, premiered this week worldwide.

In the United States, according to crunchyrollthe film surpassed the US$ 20 million mark, becoming the highest-grossing film premiere in the country.

The return of Dragon Ball

Whether you’ve seen some of the previous 20 movies or one of the countless episodes of the series on the small screen, or you’re just arriving in the Dragon Ball universe right now, if there’s one thing guaranteed, it’s a pure action story.

Before the premiere, fans of the anime and this franchise showed some nervousness about the change of director Tetsuro Kodama in animation. The story would not be drawn by hand – a preference of anime fans – but the characters would be made digitally, a process known in English as GG (computer generated).

In social networks, Dragon Ball fans were pleased with the result, something that is reflected in the box office worldwide.

What is this installment of Dragon Ball about?

The tape focuses on the resurrection of the famous “Red Patrol” through Hedo, the grandson of Dr. Gero, and Magenta.

Contrary to previous tapes, the story does not feature Goku and Vegeta. Piccolo and Gohan, Goku’s son, take the lead to try to defeat the new “superheroes” of the franchise: Gamma 1 and Gamma 2, from the “Red Patrol”.

The tape begins with a brief reminder of what the “Red Patrol” is, something that non-fans of the franchise will appreciate because they will understand the story perfectly from this point. This is an organization that sought to take over the world, but its goals were not achieved after being defeated by Son Goku as a child.

However, Magenta did not give up and seeks to restore this organization so she enlists the help of Hedo, Dr. Gero’s grandson.

Piccolo, the green-skinned character, infiltrates the “Red Patrol” and from there all the action is triggered where, of course, we will see spectacular battles and many, many screams.

“Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero”, the version

Fans of the franchise in Latin America will have voices already known through the series as such. However, the arrival of a new actor, who plays one of the protagonists, caused a positive stir in networks.

This is the actor Luis Manuel Ávila, with a long career in Mexico on television and theater, and who is well remembered for his role in “La familia P. Luche”.

Ávila is the voice of Gohan, and comes to the role after the death in 2020 of Luis Alfonso Mendoza, who traditionally gave life in to the son of Goku.

Ávila’s name was so popular that the dubbing director, Lalo Garza (who also plays Krillin), turned his eyes and heard this actor.

“In the case of Luis Manuel, the situation was so familiar to me, the name… They mentioned it to me so much that I began to see it, I began to analyze a little bit of his work, I began to analyze the timbre of his voice, the color of his voice, because something I didn’t want was an impersonator,” Garza told Pop Zone in an interview via Zoom.

“I needed a good actor and obviously Luis Manuel’s career is proven. Consider Luis Manuel along with other options for testing. We went through several stages and in the end they opted for him,” Garza said.

The challenge of Luis Manuel Álvila as Gohan

Ávila, who although he had a participation in “Zodiac Warriors”, was treading new ground in terms of dubbing a franchise like this, so he trusted Garza’s direction to play Gohan.

“Something that we discussed with Lalo and that she took care of me throughout the process is that my voice was as natural as possible, that my timbre reached that naturalness in order to have a wide range of emotions and be able to deliver them to the character,” Ávila told Pop Zone.

“What was also sought from the beginning, along with the entire process, was to rather achieve the acting process, emulate the acting process that Luis Alfonso followed to get to the character. Not so much his timbre, not so much his voice,” Ávila added.

This is the point that Garza wanted to achieve by insisting that as dubbing actors they do not want to imitate and in the case of having had a story with a voice already known in Latin America, such as that of Luis Alfonso Mendoza, what he was looking for was to find similar tones. .

“We did not want to imitate, but we wanted to find the same nuances, the same tonalities that Luis Alfonso had. We were not going to imitate his voice. It was this in which tone Luis Alfonso handled it, what resonators did he use? What was the sonority like when Luis Did Alfonso do this? It’s not imitating, it’s matching the type of nuances that anyone can match. The difference is that my tone of voice is not so similar. In the case of Luis Manuel, it is, “added Garza.