Viral Gogeta Fan Animation Slaps So Hard Even Toei’s Dragon Ball Pales in Comparison

Dragon Ball fans have been waiting for new animated content since Dragon Ball Super‘s finale in 2018. Sure, two movies had come after that, but there weren’t weekly episodes that fans would rather watch. As the release for Dragon Ball Daima comes closer, fans continue to pump out more fan animation videos than ever before.

Dragon Ball DAIMA | Credit: Toei Animation

Love or hate them, Dragon Ball fans are extremely talented when it comes to making fan animations or fan manga. In fact, Toyotaro, the current author of the Dragon Ball Super manga, initially began as a fan manga artist who wrote a version of Tablos’ Dragon Ball AF. Recently, one fan animation has been making its way over the internet, and fans are begging Toei to hire this person.

Gogeta vs Janemba fan animation better than the original?!

Gogeta in Dragon Ball Z: Fusion Reborn | Credits: Toei Animation

On September 7, 2024, an animator by the name kazumax76 over at X, uploaded a short fan animation clip where Super Saiyan Gogeta battles against what seems to be Janemba.

In the video, Gogeta moves around and dodges Janemba’s attacks with a stoic expression on his face. It seems to be referencing the original battle between the two in Dragon Ball Z: Fusion Reborn, where the fight takes place in Hell. The spikes and ice patterns in the clips tell fans that it is indeed taking inspiration from that movie.

However, the animation is quite different. The style is very similar to that of Shintani in Dragon Ball Super: Broly. The different colors added into each frame, the smoothness and fluidity in each movement and the fact that Gogeta steps on some ice indicate that it’s a clear inspiration from Toei’s 2018 hit. The OST used in the background is “You Say Run” from My Hero Academia.

Both Japanese and English fans in the comments praise the animator for his stellar work, with one of them saying that Toei Animation should hire the guy.

However, there are fans who will always take shots at the official studios while commenting on fan animations. For instance, one French fan remembered that atrociously looking Dragon Ball Super episode 4 where Super Saiyan Goku fought Beerus on King Kai’s planet. Though it wasn’t the animators’ fault, the scheduling for the series was so bad that the animator had less time to work with their full potential.

The translation of the above post goes as follows:

Remember that, one day, a reputable animation studio with more budget, more time, more manpower, you name it…

…came up with episode 4 of DBS

The more fan animation I see, the more I realize that studios are more and more entitled to make mistakes.

By having these episodes in mind, some fans conclude that fan animation is better than official material. Little do they know that fan animators have no scheduling problems, have years to work on their stuff and they do this for fun.

However, this wasn’t the first time fans feel this way. In 2022, THE NEW CHALLENGER PRODUCTIONS made a 12-minute fan animation of Goku vs. Broly that changed the landscape of fan animation forever!

This fan-made Dragon Ball short film broke the internet!

Vegeta vs Broly | Credits: Toei Animation

“LEGEND – A DRAGON BALL TALE” begins with King Vegeta passing on some instructions to his son Vegeta IV and the scene switches to Goku facing Chichi in the World Martials Arts Tournament arena, referencing their actual fight in Dragon Ball‘s Piccolo Jr. arc. While this is going on, Vegeta lands on Earth out of nowhere and analyses Goku’s power level. At the same time, Broly lands on Earth in a Saiyan spacepod out of nowhere and challenges Vegeta to a fight.

Vegeta quickly loses and Goku steps in after seeing Chichi getting her arm broken by Broly. The animators takes a cut out of Goku’s Super Saiyan transformation against Frieza and created a new Sun Wukong-like form for the Saiyan. That entire fight was nothing short of spectacular. Both the artstyle and animation quality was out of this world.

The director, Naseer Pasha, revealed that it took him and his team 4 years to make this. And this is something fans forget to notice. While they quickly jump to criticizing official material by Toei Animation, they forget that the animators at Toei have only months to come up with episodes that are twice as long as the aforementioned fan animation.

At the end of the day, both the sides deserve respect for what they do and fans need to encourage both of them to pump out better material as Dragon Ball enters a new era.

Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, and Dragon Ball Super are available to watch on Crunchyroll.