‘Dragon Ball’ creator back in action
Hats off to Akira Toriyama, who was not yet 30 when his landmark manga “Dragon Ball” was published in 1984. Thirty-five years later, the 20th movie with ties to the series, “Dragon Ball Super: Broly,” hits North American theaters, including cinemas across the Bay Area, after already being a boxoffice hit in Asia and Latin America.
And the movie empire is but a thin slice of the $23 billion-and-rising “Dragon Ball” media pie, with four separate television series and several TV specials, video games as well as the original manga series, which has sold 350 million copies worldwide.
“Dragon Ball” references abound in hip-hop. Athletes such as the Warriors’ Jordan Bell have worn “Dragon Ball”-themed shoes in games, two Cleveland Browns players performed the “Dragon Ball”-inspired “fusion” dance after a touchdown against the Raiders in Oakland this season, and a 56-foot-tall, 70foot-long balloon of main character Goku stole the show at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
“I’ve been a fan for so long, and I know a lot of others are too. It’s like a cult following,” Sacramento Kings guard De’Aaron Fox told the Associated Press recently.
Toriyama, 63, who hasn’t always been directly involved in the various iterations of his own creation, has his fingerprints all over “Dragon Ball Super: Broly” — which is being screened in the original Japanese with English subtitles in a few places and an English-dubbed version in most theaters. He wrote the screenplay and personally supervised the production, which is meant to serve as a transition between the “Dragon Ball Super” TV series (2015-18) and the beginning of a new story arc — meaning that, theoretically, you don’t have to be a “Dragon Ball” fan to understand the labyrinthine story line.
But although the story line is new, there are many characters familiar to fans.
The original “Dragon Ball” story was inspired by the 16th century Chinese novel “Journey to the West,” about a wandering Buddhist monk. Toriyama’s hero is Goku, a Saiyan (an extraterrestrial race of warriors) who trains in martial arts and travels the world searching for the seven Dragon Balls, each of which contains a wish-granting dragon.
That, of course, was many story lines ago. Goku is back in “Dragon Ball Super: Broly,” which is directed by veteran anime filmmaker Tatsuya Nagamine. But the focus is on another Saiyan: Broly, a character who last appeared in the early ’90s as a villain, and now operates as more antihero. In fact, he might or might not be a fabled Super Saiyan.
The three-part story line is too dizzying to explain here, plus part of the delight of a “Dragon Ball” movie is to enjoy the outlandish twists and turns that play out on an interplanetary scale. Essentially, Goku and series regular Vegeta encounter Broly and his father and are caught up in a plot by series villain Frieza, who is bent on stealing all the Dragon Balls.
The first hour of the movie paves the way for the last third, which is nearly wall-towall action — “Dragon Ball” has always been anime’s most action-packed series, and “Broly” rivals the action in the great “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.”
Interestingly, Toriyama’s early influences as he ascended in his anime career were Disney’s “One Hundred and One Dalmatians” and Jackie Chan’s early martial arts comedies. Now he is regarded as the most influential anime artist in history, surpassing “Astro Boy” creator Osamu Tezuka, considered the godfather of anime.
He is also the creator of the “Dr. Jump” and “Dragon Quest” series, but nothing has made anime an international phenomenon more than the “Dragon Ball” series. He works out of his studio in the small city of Kiyosu, in his native Aichi Prefecture, far from Tokyo.
As a child, he recalls looking across his rural landscape, imagining gods, heroes and monsters doing battle. Which is pretty much what “Dragon Ball” became.
“When I was a kid, there was nothing but fields all around me, so all there really was to see was the horizon,” Toriyama told an interviewer in 2016. “There’s something about that I like . ... It’s the idea that mystical sages might be secretly living out there somewhere.”
Akira Toriyama, who hasn’t always been directly involved in the various iterations of his own creation, has his fingerprints all over “Dragon Ball Super: Broly”