Nearly 4 years after Broly, Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero – the 21st Dragon Ball film overall, and 4th of the modern era – opened this weekend in North American theaters, playing in both English and Japanese for the first time in franchise history, and with the widest opening for an anime film ever in the United States, playing on nearly 4,000 screens! It’s also the first Dragon Ball film to be produced completely in 3D CGI, with a new team led by director Tetsuro Kodama bringing Akira Toriyama’s script to life in a very different style than we’ve seen before. And the movie turned out to be well worth the wait and the hype, telling a compelling character-driven story centered on Piccolo, Gohan, and Pan, with several wonderful new characters, a lot of incredible action, plenty of big laughs, and even a few surprisingly touching pay-offs at the end! It’s a great Dragon Ball movie, and a big step forward for CGI anime, and it makes for an incredible fun discussion between Sean and Jonathan.

Enjoy, and come back next time for Part 1 of our Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood review, where we’ll be covering Episodes 1-32 of the 2009 anime!

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Ahead of the release of Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero in North American theaters this Friday, we’re bringing you three special bonus episodes all about Dragon Ball, originally recorded in 2019 for The Weekly Stuff Podcast. In today’s episode, we review the spectacular 2018 film Dragon Ball Super: Broly, which saw Akira Toriyama taking all the most popular ‘non-canonical’ pieces from various Dragon Ball movies and TV specials – Broly, Bardock, and Gogeta – and reinvent each into a shockingly compelling new package. Brilliantly directed by Tatsuya Nagamine and with a gorgeous new animation style from Naohiro Shintani, Broly is an aesthetic tour-de-force, with the best production values the franchise has ever seen – all of which gave Sean and Jonathan a lot to gush about on this episode. And we’re glad to resurrect this review of the last Dragon Ball Super movie just as the new one opens today in theaters across North America!

Enjoy, and come back Monday for our next all-new episode where we’ll be reviewing the latest Dragon Ball film, Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero!

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Ahead of the release of Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero in North American theaters this Friday, we’re bringing you three special bonus episodes all about Dragon Ball, originally recorded in 2019 for The Weekly Stuff Podcast. In today’s episode, we look back on the three Dragon Ball Z movies from the 90s that introduced the iconic – if not always entertaining – character Broly, the legendary Super Saiyan. Before he was successfully reinvented by Akira Toriyama himself for the 2018 Dragon Ball Super film, Broly was a monosyllabic buff dude who mostly shouted “KAKAROTTO!!” and punched things before being beaten in an 11th-hour deus ex machina, and his films – DBZ Movies 8, 10, and 11 – are mostly duds, albeit ones that are very entertaining to talk about. It’s a conversation we very much enjoyed having back in the day, before we knew how much we’d love Broly coming out of the Dragon Ball Super film, and we’re happy to share it with Japanimation Station listeners today.

Enjoy, and come back tomorrow for our final Dragon Ball bonus as we review the Dragon Ball Super: Broly film and see how Broly got his groove back!

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Ahead of the release of Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero in North American theaters this Friday, we’re bringing you three special bonus episodes all about Dragon Ball, originally recorded in 2019 for The Weekly Stuff Podcast. In today’s episode, we’re talking all about Dragon Ball Super, the TV series that aired between 2015 and 2018, building off the Battle of Gods and Resurrection ‘F’ films to expand the world of Dragon Ball into whole new Universes! In this podcast, Sean and Jonathan break down all the major Super arcs, from the rough early episodes retelling the prior films, to the big three anime-original arcs: the Universe 6 vs Universe 7 tournament, the Future Trunks arc, and the giant ‘Universe Survival’ arc that pitted all 12 universe’s best fighters against one another in a crazy battle royale. It’s an imperfect series, but one we really enjoyed, especially in its outstanding second half, and it’s such a blast to talk about.

Enjoy, and come back tomorrow for another Dragon Ball bonus as we break down the original Broly films from the 90s!

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The first Fullmetal Alchemist anime comes to its ultimate conclusion in the 2005 feature film Conqueror of Shamballa, a narratively messy but beautifully made movie that showcases the best and the worst that this ‘alternate’ version of Fullmetal Alchemist has to offer. With Edward Elric lost in ‘our’ world on the other side of the gate, Conqueror of Shamballa is set primarily in 1923 Germany on the eve of the Nazi Party’s ‘Beer Hall Putsch,’ with Ed navigating a society on the brink of collapse into genocidal fascism. It’s a fascinating and often quite effective setting, while the action back in Amestris – where Alphonse Elric, back in his human body, is searching for a way to get back to his brother – feels pretty threadbare. The worlds eventually collide, and we see how Seiji Mizushima and company bring this version of the story to a close, with Sean and Jonathan giving their final thoughts on how the 2003 version of Fullmetal Alchemist stands the test of time nearly 20 years later.

Enjoy, and come back throughout the week for a series of Dragon Ball bonus episodes leading up to the American release – and our review of – the new film Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero!

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For our first anime subject, we’re diving into the world of Hiromu Arakawa’s Fullmetal Alchemist, starting with the 2003 anime that partially adapted the then-young manga before branching off into an increasingly divergent anime-original story. While it was a huge and acclaimed hit, in Japan and abroad, at the time of release, the show has a more controversial reputation now, years after Arakawa’s manga was completed and faithfully re-adapted as Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood. Sean and Jonathan are coming at the 2003 series from wildly different directions – Jonathan a lifelong fan who started with this anime as a kid, and Sean only recently having read the manga without ever seeing either anime – so our perspectives inherently diverge. But if there’s one thing we clearly agree on, it’s that this is a fascinating show very much worth talking about. Whether one loves it or hates it, it’s clearly more than an outdated curio, and we think you, like us, will come away from this conversation with a greater appreciation for all versions of Fullmetal Alchemist.

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Welcome to Japanimation Station, an anime podcast brought to you by the folks at The Weekly Stuff Podcast. We are here to dive into the wide and wacky world of anime, and you can subscribe on all platforms at JapanimationStation.Com.

For the debut episode of Japanimation Station, Sean Chapman and Jonathan Lack introduce themselves and host a spirited discussion about how they got into anime, how their fandoms and interests have evolved over the years, what makes animation special in the first place, and why anime in particular is the thing we find so interesting we had to make a whole podcast about it. You’ll learn about our backgrounds, our philosophies, our anime likes and dislikes, and much more as we introduce you to the foundational ideas of our show! And at the end, we share which 5 anime we would each take to a desert island if such a strange fate were to befall us.

Enjoy, and come back next week for our first anime review with Fullmetal Alchemist, the original 2003 anime based on Hiromu Arakawa’s classic manga! Subscribe at JapanimationStation.Com to make sure you don’t miss a single episode!

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Jonathan Lack and Sean Chapman, hosts of the upcoming anime podcast Japanimation Station, speak with musician Thomas Lack, composer of the original theme song to Japanimation Station!

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Visit our website and subscribe to Japanimation Station on all podcast platforms: http://japanimationstation.com

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Original Music composed and produced by Thomas Lack