My problem with most Anime movies based on TV shows is that they are fairly disconnected from the TV show roots. They sometimes totally flub up character development that has been built up over many episodes, are really hard to place chronologically, will completely disregard events in the show, and are altogether a mess. However, they are usually entertaining, and that is usually enough for me.
In Tree of Might, warriors from another planet descend on the Earth. Most of these warriors, you never get their names, or even what planet they are from, however, as they call Kakirott (aka Goku) by name, and have a Saiyan warrior with them, you can deduce that they must be from Freiza's army. The warriors' crash-landing on Earth causes the forest to catch on fire - in exactly the same forest that Gohan (this is Goku's son to the uninitiated) and the other Z fighters happen to be camping. So, the Z fighters put out the fire, Gohan rescues a purple dinosaur that he names Icarus, and they summon the eternal dragon (fairly quickly considering the seven Dragonballs always gets scattered to different reaches of the Earth every time they summon him) to restore the forest.
So, they put out the fire, and no one thinks anything about this. While setting around the table one day, King Kai contacts Goku and tells him that warriors have descended on the Earth, and planted a Tree of Might. This tree was created to grow fruit to be eaten by the eternal dragon, but the problem is, to get the nutrients needed to produce the fruit, it burrows deep into the ground, and rapes the earth of all its resources until it kills the planet. So they run off to fight these warriors, who are relative weaklings compared with some of the characters you see in later series, but Goku and Gohan have not learned how to go Super Saiyan yet, so they get their butts handed to them.Oh, and evil Saiyan also tries to kidnap Gohan. We learn here that Gohan still has his Sayan tail (which I am pretty sure in the show, his tail gets cut off at a much younger age), and can transform into a monster under the moonlight.
In Lord Slug, the earth gets invaded by an army from the far reaches of space. Their goal - to transform the Earth into a giant spaceship by terafreezing the planet. Ignore the fact that there were only about a hundred of these guys, and they came on a spaceship roughly two-thirds the size of the Earth to begin with. Goku is out of commission for the first half of the movie, as he and Krillian went to try to stop the spaceship crashing into the Earth to begin with, and failed. So the first half of the movie is Gohan, Chi-Chi and Oolang beating up on the new arrivals. Then Lord Slug comes out, somehow manages to collect all seven dragonballs within an hour, and wishes for eternal youth. About the time he comes to kick the snot out of Gohan, Piccilo arrives to join the fight. When Piccilo starts to have the snot beat out of him, Goku appears out of nowhere, fully revived after eating a Sensu bean. Goku gets the snot beat out of him as well, but if you are a fan of the series, you know that Goku never looses, he keeps finding a way to surpass his current limits. So, we see the first showing in a movie of the Super Saiyan (which is anticlimactic for fans of the show, as we have seen Goku go all the way up to, what, Super Saiyan level 4 or something), but this lasts for only about 45 seconds, because it turns out that Lord Slug is a Super Namic.
Video quality
Considering how much Funimation hypes their digital transfer process, it is nothing spectacular. If restoration and dirt removal were really done to the extent that they claim, then the source material must have been in REALLY bad shape. Now don't get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the encoding process or anything. Colors are sharp, edges are sharp and well-defined, and no compression artifacts. No, the problem is that there is a TON of dirt in the film, to the point that it is almost distracting. Areas where there should be tons of detail look muddy and look out of place with the rest of the movie. Colors are not as vibrant as you might expect (although they do look good, just not great).
Unlike the earlier Blu-Ray releases, which were 4x3 masters cropped to 16x9, these two movies look like they were actually mastered in 16x9, so that the original DVD releases were actually cropped in this case. Seeing these movies in their original aspect ration (or what I imagine their original aspect ration is) should excite DBZ fans.
Sound quality
Funimation released 3 DBZ discs (6 movies) before this one on Blu-Ray, and I must say that sound quality was all over the place. Their first disc release was DTS Master Audio, their second disc was was Dolby TrueHD although the track sounded flat, and the third disc only had the US voices with the Japanese music in Dolby TrueHD - the English voice with the US music was ported from the DVD release and was 2 channel Dolby Digital, despite what the disc cover said. This time, we finally got both English tracks in Dolby TrueHD, and they sound absolutely incredible.
Normally I am not a fan of US dubbing, but I must say that DragonBall Z was the first anime dubbed and with new music where the English soundtrack was better than the original Japanese. Purists may not like it - it changed the feel of the show. The original Japanese track is very cartoony, and makes the show almost comical. The US music and voice acting really tend to make the show more action oriented, and keep fans glued to their sets.
Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, there was an outcry of fans to the US production houses to start including the original Japanese tracks with their releases. Funimation gave us this here on the BluRay, but you may be disappointed. The Japanese was done back in the late 80s / early 90s, so its a mono soundtrack from an analog source that is in very poor shape. Still, it is the original soundtrack, as we asked for, with no processing or anything done to it.
The English tracks with US music make very good use of all the channels, and it does have a pounding music soundtrack, but do not expect anything over-the-top. This is a cartoon with studio-produced sound, and while much has been remastered, the sound just is not going to hold up well when put against modern movies
Oh, if you have not seen Lord Slug in Japanese, I suggest at least watching it with the Japanese music at least once. Gohan and Icarus's dance is SO cute. Luckily, the Japanese version is on the US track with Japanese music, so you get a really high quality version of this. You will have this stuck in your mind for days. Probably the cutest thing to EVER grace any of the Dragonball series or movies.
Bonus features
Your bonus features is limited to a few trailers for different Funimation series. Most are in SD.
Final Word
This was a fun movie set for Dragonball fans. Lord Slug is probably one of the better Dragonball movies and is certainly better than the silliness that is Tree of Might. I will admit that if you are not a fanboy of this show, you will be completely lost. Fans will find a breathtakingly beautiful remaster with the Dragonball movies presented in a way that they never have been presented before, and even purists will be happy with the inclusion of the original Japanese track. The future sure does look bright for anime in HD.