Dragon Ball Z: Super Android 13! (1992)
Anyone posting about film on social media is, at least in part, trying to curate taste to showcase the films that are well-loved, canonized, and endlessly analyzed. So you’ll see endless people post that one shot from 2001, but not shots from Legally Blonde, The Craft, or 10 Things I Hate About You. These aren’t films where formal craft and beauty were necessarily at the forefront, but that doesn’t mean they don’t occasionally contain some beautiful imagery.
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Which brings me to today’s shot from a Dragon Ball Z TV movie. Not something your typical garden-variety know-it-all film bro would deign to discuss. But I deign.
This shot from Dragon Ball Z: Super Android 13 struck me, and I think it’s because I love reflections, repetition, and strong graphic compositions — and this shot has all three. It takes something as simple as a character appearing on a monitor and turns it into this incredibly graphic composition of repetition, geometry, color, and depth. The repeated image of Android 15 across all the monitors almost transforms his face into a graphic motif, reminding me of those famous repeated celebrity portraits by Andy Warhol, where repetition turns a recognizable face into something almost purely visual.
