The Dragon Ball Z Flashback Behind Dave Franco’s Raww

Raww's big visual clue is not a random style gag

The directors Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado explain that the film gives several recollections their own visual identities. In an interview for The Credits, Crawford said Raww's bravado suggested a Dragon Ball Z Super-inspired treatment, while a different character's recollection leans toward a romantic magical-girl reference. The principle is pleasantly direct: a memory does not have to look neutral when it is being told by somebody with a very particular idea of themselves.

That makes the flashback a small piece of character writing, not an interruption from another movie. The heightened poses, speed and comic force suit a creature determined to project toughness. The official material calls Raww hapless as well as well-meaning, which gives the shift a built-in wink. I read the moment as a visual version of someone telling a childhood story with their chest out, adding just enough sparkle to make themselves sound heroic. That is interpretation, not a claim about a hidden plot point, and it is why the choice lands without requiring a spoiler map.

The rest of the movie has been preparing us for this

Raww's sequence is easier to understand once you notice that Forgotten Island has already made memory its visual subject. The film begins with Jo and Raissa's friendship at a turning point, then lets the world around them expand into Nakali. Cartoon Brew's conversation with the directors describes an opening friendship montage and a later memory sequence that are designed as emotional storytelling, not decorative detours. Its report also notes that an album of Mercado's childhood photographs helped inform the montage's tactile, aged look.

Crawford and Mercado did not settle for one house look. Philstar.com's report says the team blended hand-drawn elements with CG and chose a colorful, anime-like visual language for a Philippines-set story in the 1990s. In a separate Animation World Network interview, the directors describe three flashbacks, each keyed to its narrator's point of view. Raww's is part of a film-wide grammar: memories are personal, so their form is personal too.

Why the change matters for a voice performance

A voice performance gives viewers only part of an animated character's result. Here, the visual team makes Raww's account feel louder without asking Franco's performance to carry every bit of the joke by itself. The directors' production interview describes the character-specific style choice. That is a useful way to watch the role: listen for the energy, then notice how the picture decides what that energy looks like.

There is a welcome bit of evidence that the character was built for connection rather than only for one-liners. A pre-release interview reported Crawford describing Raww as someone eager to be part of a group, and said Franco's energy helped make the casting click. The full claims deserve caution because that interview also discusses backstory details the official synopsis does not confirm, but its published conversation with the directors supports the basic creative point. I would keep the firmest facts to DreamWorks' own description and let the interviews illuminate process, not replace it.

A small scene with a big invitation

The broader setting matters here, too. Mercado told Cartoon Brew that the team wanted viewers to feel the same care for the Philippines that they admired in filmmakers portraying places they knew intimately. The Credits reports that the creative work draws on Philippine culture, places and artists, including 2D work by Quezon City-based Snipple Animation. No single borrowed aesthetic can explain the movie, and the directors' own account places the flashback inside that larger, deliberately mixed visual world.

That distinction is worth preserving. The Dragon Ball Z Super reference describes one short character-specific choice, not a claim that the whole film imitates one visual tradition. The larger design combines CG, hand-drawn passages, photographic texture, Philippine references and several deliberately different memory treatments. Animation World Network's account says the three flashbacks were completed by Snipple Animation in Quezon City and were tied to their individual narrators. A good visual explainer should make the precise part vivid without flattening everything around it.

So the memorable detail is this: the weredog gets to narrate like an action legend for a minute. It is a bright little reward for paying attention to how animation works. Dave Franco's Raww is the doorway into the question, but the answer is really about a film that treats remembering as an art form. I like that it gives a secondary character the dignity of his own impossible, overcaffeinated genre.