As we’ve established in parts #1 and #2 of this 48 part series, there are a lot of things I love about Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball. The disheartening arrival of the abomination Dragonball Evolution dulled my enthusiasm for a time, but I feel it flowing back into me, raisin’ the ol’ power level back up to arbitrary numbers.

Anyhoo, one of these things I really love about Dragon Ball is that its elegant, elemental narrative style and clear characterization make it easy to notice the wide variety of tropes, motifs and other devices that Toriyama uses to guide and develop his storylines. It has the epic Brechtian quality of a theatrical production where you can see the wires and the lighting equipment, without breaking the emotional identification and welcoming effortlessness of Stanislavski’s “Magic If.”

So, taking a bit of a break from using everything else I know to try to explain Dragon Ball, today I will use what I know about Dragon Ball to explain something else. Namely, one of the most useful and interesting distinction in parts of speech across poetical and literary systems, and also one of the most neglected in the casual enjoyment of art.

Today’s battle in the expansive desert, full of its elaborate rock formations that all produce prodigious dust clouds upon their destruction?

Metonymy and Metaphor. If these are things you’re not 100% solid on, read on, increase your literary power level, and actually learn something pretty simple that will help you enjoy art and lesser things you already like all the more. Because they’re certainly using it . . .

(Oh, and if you’re 100% solid on them, you’re clearly an enthusiast, so that is no excuse to turn away from the “Read More” button)

In tribute to this weekend’s release of Up, the latest sure-fire hit from Pixar, we’ve asked our Think Tankers about one of the modern world’s most enduring and picturesque fantasies:

“What is your favorite instance of somebody or bodies getting carried away by a balloon or balloons?”

And they have been, dare I say it, Up to the task. Make sure you weigh in with your choice in our poll or the comments — careful, not too much!

Hey! 5th Dimension! Play us to the article!

Eyes front, you maggots!

In this special Memorial Day Weekend Think Tank, Overthinking It takes a moment to honor the fictional sacrifices that fictional soldiers have made to defend our fictional country against its fictional foes.

But these noble heroes could not have made the sacrifices they did without a firm hand to guide them. Someone who was cruel to be kind. Someone who bitched them out like a New Orleans pimp but loved them like a father.

We’re talking about the king of the non-commissioned officers: the sergeant.

This week’s Think Tank: who is the best movie, TV, video game, cartoon, music or comic book sergeant?

In the new Street Fighter movie, Chun Li is REPEATEDLY told that only she can stop Bison.

There is no evidence of this.

—Matthew Belinkie, Overthinker

We’re going to go from the inside out here folks. I’m going to start talking about Dragon Ball and something I think makes Dragon Ball special — then I’m going to branch off pretty quickly into the rest of pop culture, why it is the way it is, and what it can learn from Toriyama’s storytelling style.

Image by Matthew Yu

I was very glad when Atomic Red wrote in to ask us about “The Chosen One” in popular culture, because I’d just completed a vigorous e-mail exchange with Belinkie on this very topic — and on how it relates to how much the new Dragon Ball movie sucks in both concept and execution (although this was mostly drawn from the trailer, as I have not seen it yet).

According to the trailer, the Dragon Ball movie is about magical Dragon Balls being created by seven mystics who defended the earth from an alien invasion, and how somebody needs to find them so that he can save the world in the style of people who came before. Who? Why, “The Chosen One,” of course.

This is nonsense. Everybody knows the Dragon Balls were created by the Namekian Kami, after he banished evil from his body and became Guardian of the Earth, as a challenge to the people of Earth to test their courage and follow their dreams, and that most people looking for them at the beginning of the story just want sex.

Okay, maybe not everybody knows that. I will concede it is somewhat beside the point.

The point is, I am tired of prophesy and destiny dominating popular adventure media. I am so tired of reluctant, dithering heroes being told they need to do something that they are thoroughly incapable of doing and that is totally against their natures, with the main justification being a mystical prophesy that, until this very moment, has usually not come up in any of these characters’ lives.

Overthinking It would like to bid farewell to Bea Arthur, who has died at the age of 86 of cancer.

Believe it or not, I’ve wondered from time to time what it would feel like when Bea Arthur died. She’s been playing older women on television since before I was born, but always stern, strong vigorous ones with a humanizing touch of whimsy and joy at living. She never seemed to falter in the face of aging, just as she never stepped off her unique center of gravity on our culture – declining the passivity or ingratiating tendencies associated with so many female character actresses and comediennes, while refusing to disrespect or disregard her own femininity.

As part of her life’s work, Ms. Arthur redefined the boundaries of “womanliness,” and when she’s been a traditional butt of jokes, it’s often been at least in part because people knew her, and her image, could take it. It’s often hard to define where acting falls in the scope of the greater mission of art, but I would say Bea Arthur gives us a great example – she created characters in such a way, uniquely and independently from writing and direction – that she has expanded the sense for our culture of what things mean.

The basic elements of manga are characters, motif, story, theme, direction in the form of picture composition, sound, action, effects . . . and then timing, sense and many other factors . . . . I began to understand that unless I comprehended and mastered all those factors myself, I couldn’t even begin to draw even a simple “Well, it’s kinda interesting,” light-read type of manga.

Toriyama-sensei is like a god to me.

- Mashashi Kishimoto, creator of Naruto

The man who brought you all the characters from Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior and Chrono Trigger has a magnum opus. It is one of the most widely disseminated and influential works of fiction from the waning decades of the 20th century. Many mock it, everyone imitates it, but no one duplicates it, because it has duplicated itself more than an ancestral family yogurt culture. It is a genre of one.

Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball just may be the best printed work you’ve never taken seriously. If you have taken it seriously, we here at Overthinking It are here to say: you’re probably crazy. And you’re not alone.

Today begins a series of in-depth discourses on this chi-blasting work of staggering genius. But first, I need you to do me a favor:

Stand up.

Assume a ready position, feet shoulder-width apart, staring straight ahead.

Scream for five minutes straight.

Done? Good. Now, read on –

Watchmen is the kind of work that invites interpretation.  It has resonance with real-world political events and a tone of high moral seriousness, but no overt moral or political message.  The formalist conceits are dazzling in their coquemplexity, but lack the clear symbolic significance of, say, the gimmick from Memento.  So what does it all mean?

Probably every geek-in-good-standing has a theory, and your humble blogger is no exception.  However, it’s entirely impossible that this isn’t the right question to be asking.  As noted in a recent post, Watchmen has a reputation as a serious literary work.  Words like “complex” and “difficult” get tossed around a lot, and not without cause.  But if it is worthwhile for its “complexity,” then doesn’t it follow that providing the book with a moral is in a sense robbing it of the very thing that makes it special?  In any case, crappy novels may have laudable messages, while many a masterpiece is appalling at it’s core.  So when it comes to judging or explaining the value of Watchmen as a work of narrative art, its message is irrelevant at best.

And yet… and yet… the text is so mysterious on so many levels that it seems to cry out for exegesis. You have to be willing to entertain this sort of speculation if you’re going to engage with it at all:  refusing to speculate about Watchmen is like refusing to laugh at a comedy.

So what does Watchmen mean? Beyond the jump, I’ll take up that question, but although I’ve thought hard about this, and I really do believe in the answers I’ve come up with, they remain as personal (and ultimately meaningless) as laughter.  I’m sure that many of you reading this have interpretations of your own, and I hope you’ll laugh along with me by sharing them in the comments… that act of speculation, I think, is all that “really getting” the work entails.

One last thing:  this is really only for people who’ve read it already.  I will SPOIL the major Watchmen plot twist; what’s more I’m going to assume that everyone already knows the characters and plot.  (Also it should be noted that this is about the Watchmen book.  As of this writing, I haven’t seen the movie.)

The Internet is abuzz!  Watchmen is coming!  Watchmen is coming!  The early reviews are in: Variety hates it.  The Times (UK) loves it.  Kevin Smith thinks it’s a work of genius.  The Hollywood Reporter says it’s the first flop of 2009.

What are we, the people, supposed to make of these wildly divergent reviews?  How will we know if Watchmen is worth seeing or not?

The Overthinking It readers look up and shout  ‘Help us, Mlawski!’

And I look down and whisper, ‘Okay.’

This Internet is afraid of me.  I’ve seen its true face.

[This continues our coverage of New York Comic-Con 2009]

While Miley Cyrus’ Asian Eyes were spreading controversy throughout the interwebs, a group of Asian-American comic book authors and illustrators were at New York Comic-Con promoting their upcoming anthology of Asian American superhero stories, Secret Identies. OTI’s writer of the Asian persuasion was there, of course. Not surprisingly, the portrayal of Asian-Americans in pop culture is an issue near and dear to my heart, so I was intrigued to see how their work deals with the oh-so-sensitive subject of race and ethnicity.

[This continues our coverage of NY Comic-Con 2009]

This was arguably the main event of this year’s Comic-Con: Warner Brother was trotting out previews for three of its upcoming films: Watchmen (opens March 6), Friday the 13th (opens Feb 13), and Terminator: Salvation (opens May 22). Each preview was also accompanied by a Q&A session with select movie makers.

First up was the oh-so-highly-anticipated Watchmen.

Spoiler-free first impressions of Watchmen, after the jump.