Dragonball Wraps Filming; Reveals Green Lava

Posted by Josh Radde (josh@filmschoolrejects.com) on March 25, 2008

James Wong’s adaptation of the beloved anime tale, Dragonball, completed filming recently. Comingsoon.net ran the story they gleaned by creepin’ on good ol’ Emmy Rossum’s (Phanton of the Opera, Day After Tomorrow) MySpace page. According to the page filming for the film (at least Emmy’s portion of it) wrapped last Friday and our first image of the movie looks pretty cool:

Where in the world do you find green lava? Europe, no doubt. Actually that’s most likely a green-screen platform so that the filmmakers can put some pretty cool stuff inside this detailed volcano. This is actually a solid first image. It reminds me of Transformers somehow with the mixture of dark blues and fiery oranges.

For those not familiar with the story, it revolves around a young man named Goku (Justin Chatwin) who has to obtain the 7 mythical “dragon balls” so that the evil Piccolo (James Marsters - “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) can’t use them to control the world. Now I’ve come to understand there’s a difference between “Dragonball” and “Dragonball Z,” and of the very little of it I’ve seen I remember Piccolo (a giant green dude) was a good guy and Vegeta was the bad guy. Vegeta appears to not be in this film.

The production has also seen its fair amount of crap on message boards so far because its three main characters - played by Chatwin, Marsters, and Rossum - are white Americans, while the supporting actors are made up of Asian actors (with the awesome exception of Ernie Hudson aka Winston Zeddmore).

Chow Yun-Fat also stars as Master Roshi. Dragonball is due in theaters April 3, 2009.

Photo Courtesy of Slashfilm

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