Akira Toriyama

Akira Toriyama (April 5, 1955 – March 1, 2024) was a Japanese manga artist, writer, and character designer regarded as one of the most influential creators in the history of the medium.¹³¹⁷ He is best known for the martial-arts adventure series Dragon Ball, serialized in Shueisha’s Weekly Shōnen Jump from 1984 to 1995, and for the earlier comedy Dr. Slump, works whose international reach is credited with driving the popularity of Japanese animation in the Western world.¹³¹⁶ Beyond manga he lent his distinctive art to video games, most enduringly the Dragon Quest role-playing series.¹⁶¹⁸

Toriyama was born in Kiyosu, a town in Aichi Prefecture near Nagoya, and grew up with one sister in a landscape he later described as flat and empty.¹³¹⁵ He recalled looking across the rural horizon as a child, imagining gods, heroes, and monsters doing battle — the imaginative seed of what Dragon Ball would become.⁴ “When I was a kid, there was nothing but fields all around me, so all there really was to see was the horizon,” he told the website Kanzenshuu in 2015.⁴ He forwent university and, after high school, worked at an advertising agency designing posters.¹⁷

His earliest artistic enthusiasms lay in film and comics. He began drawing pictures of animals and vehicles around 1961, reportedly inspired by the animated film One Hundred and One Dalmatians, whose art style impressed him.¹³¹⁶ He was fascinated by Osamu Tezuka’s science-fiction series Astro Boy, which he described as his original inspiration for taking up manga.¹⁵²⁴ As a teenager he became a devotee of the tokusatsu series Ultraman and of live-action film and television, and his later work drew on his lifelong love of automobiles.¹⁶¹⁷

Career and manga

Toriyama’s first brush with the industry came at age 23, when a contest entry to a weekly magazine failed.¹⁷ An editor at Weekly Shōnen Jump, Kazuhiko Torishima, was struck by his submissions and encouraged him to keep sending work.¹⁵ His first published piece, Wonder Island, appeared in Weekly Shōnen Jump in 1978, but it and its sequel Wonder Island 2 — which referenced the screen culture of the day, including Dirty Harry and Ultraman — were unpopular with readers.¹⁵¹⁷ A run of further disappointments followed, including Today’s Highlight Island in 1979, before Torishima suggested he build a story around a female lead, yielding Tomato the Cutesy Gumshoe.¹⁵

That advice led to Dr. Slump, published in Weekly Shōnen Jump from 1980 to 1984.¹³¹⁵ A comedy about the super-strong girl robot Arale Norimaki and her eccentric inventor Senbei Norimaki, built largely on parodies of Japanese and Western culture, it sold over 35 million copies domestically, earned Toriyama a Shogakukan Manga Award, and was adapted into a television anime with Toriyama leading the creative team.¹⁵¹⁷ On the strength of that success he founded Bird Studio? in 1983.¹⁷

At Torishima’s suggestion Toriyama next attempted a kung-fu-style manga, drawing the two-part short Dragon Boy in 1983, which evolved directly into Dragon Ball.¹⁵¹⁷ Serialized in 519 chapters in Weekly Shōnen Jump from 1984 to 1995, the series followed Son Goku, a boy with a monkey tail and superhuman strength who searches the world for seven magical orbs that summon a wish-granting dragon.¹⁷¹⁸ Toriyama drew on the 16th-century Chinese novel Journey to the West — whose wandering monk and Monkey King inform Goku — as well as Chinese and Hong Kong action cinema and Japanese folklore.²¹⁷²⁰ He also cited the early martial-arts comedies of Jackie Chan among his influences.² Toriyama himself dated the onset of his Chinese-influenced style to around late 1981.²² The manga has sold roughly 260 million copies worldwide by the studio’s count, and higher figures — around 350 to 360 million — are also cited.¹²¹⁵¹⁷

Dragon Ball became a media empire. It was adapted into a run of television series — the original Dragon Ball (February 1986 – April 1989), Dragon Ball Z (April 1989 – January 1996), Dragon Ball GT (1996–1997), and the Toriyama-originated Dragon Ball Super (July 2015 – March 2018) — alongside more than twenty feature films.⁹¹⁶¹⁷ The first film, Dragon Ball: Curse of the Blood Rubies, opened in December 1986, and the franchise later produced hits including Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods (2013), which took about ¥2.99 billion, and Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection ‘F’ (2015), at about ¥3.74 billion.⁹ The twentieth film, Dragon Ball Super: Broly (2018), for which Toriyama wrote the screenplay and supervised production, grossed over ¥13.5 billion worldwide, the franchise’s biggest hit.²⁹¹¹ The twenty-first, Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero (2022), again had Toriyama credited with the original story, screenplay, and character design.⁵¹⁰ Estimates of the whole Dragon Ball media enterprise ran to some $23 billion by 2019.²

Among Weekly Shōnen Jump’s all-time best-selling series, Dragon Ball has been ranked at the top with circulation around 150 million volumes, ahead of One Piece and Kochikame, with Dr. Slump also placing among the magazine’s leading titles at some 35 million.³ Toriyama’s shorter and later works include Go! Go! Ackman, Pink, and SAND LAND.¹⁵¹⁸

Video games

Toriyama’s second great body of work was as a video-game artist and character designer. He co-created the long-running Dragon Quest series, beginning in 1986, and continued to contribute character and monster designs across most of its entries; a collection, Dragon Quest Illustrations, gathers over 500 of these designs from thirty years of the franchise.¹⁶¹⁸ His clean, playful style became so identified with the series that later works pay homage to it — the Like a Dragon games notably render the fantasies of protagonist Ichiban Kasuga, a Dragon Quest fan, in that idiom.¹⁸

Jump Force – Akira Toriyama Characters Trailer | PS4PlayStation

Beyond Dragon Quest, Toriyama provided the artwork for the role-playing game Chrono Trigger and for Blue Dragon, among other titles.¹⁷²³ His designs also feature in numerous Dragon Ball games, such as Dragon Ball: Xenoverse 2.¹⁶ Drawing on his love of automobiles, he designed an electric car released by Japan’s CQ Motors in 2005, a project he called “a very emotional journey”.¹⁷

Later life and legacy

Toriyama married fellow manga artist Yoshimi Katō in 1982, with whom he had two children, and kept his personal life largely private, often representing himself with a cyborg avatar called Robotoriyama.¹⁵¹⁷ He worked from his studio in Kiyosu, far from Tokyo.⁴ In 2019 France named him a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.¹⁶

He died on March 1, 2024, at age 68, of an acute subdural hematoma; the news was confirmed by Bird Studio, which noted he had left several works unfinished.¹⁷¹⁹ In a 2013 interview he professed to have “no idea” how Dragon Ball had become so popular, calling it a miracle.¹⁹

Toriyama is regarded as the most influential anime artist in history, a figure sometimes placed above Tezuka, the “godfather of anime,” in reach.² Manga creators including One Piece’s Eiichiro Oda and Naruto’s Masashi Kishimoto have cited his influence on their own careers.¹⁸ Much modern isekai and shonen visual language, filtered through Dragon Quest and Dragon Ball, descends from his hand.²³