041Animation columnist Faziela Harris-Davids pays tribute to Japanese manga artist Akira Toriyama who passed away this month.
If the words “Next time on Dragon Ball Z” didn’t have you up at 6am in the 90s, you were clearly
missing out. This week we learnt about the passing of Akira Toriyama, the legend behind
Dragon Ball Z; today we tribute his legacy.
A creative spirit at heart, Akira Toriyama was drawn to film and TV from a very young age, and
was even more enthralled when seeing the manga collection of a classmates older brother, this
began the trend of him not only redrawing manga, but creating manga of his own in his spare
time.
Despite not continuing his education after high school, he joined the workforce but found it
lacking as he was constantly being reprimanded and eventually quit. It wasn’t until he saw an
opportunity to enter a competition for amateur manga artists through Weekly Shonen Jump, that
the editor saw potential in him and encouraged him to draw manga of his own. This jump start
soon created Mr Slump, which became wildly popular, followed by other successful titles, Pola &
Roid, Mad Matic, and then Chobit, which was not as popular, forcing him to create Chobit 2 as
he could not understand why it was not successful.
As a fond enthusiast of Kung-Fu films, he was encouraged to draw a kung-fu inspired manga,
thus the creation of Dragon Ball Z. It was the start that has made him into one of the most
influential manga artists, with Dragon Ball Z spanning generations of influence, marking it as
one of the most influential anime series of all time.
This statement is further confirmed in the recognition noted by fellow manga artists upon
hearing of Akira Toriyamas passing,such as One Piece Author Elichiro Oda, Naruto creator
Masashi Kishimoto, Bleach creator Tite Kubo and Boruto: Naruto Next Generations Ilustrator
Mikio Ikemoto. Even French director Pierre Perifel notes his influence on his film The Bad Guys
that he had created for Dreamworks.
A recluse of note, Akira Toriyama had never seen being an anime artist as being a job, and only just
wanted to draw to make people happy. He even noted that Dragon Ball Z episodes were not really
planned but rather went with how he felt, which is amazing in itself. You would be lucky to find a
recent picture of him anywhere as he rarely was seen in public and used an avatar Robotoriyama to
represent himself as comedic appearances in his series.
As he took the world by storm, he is a household name globally and has inspired many an artist,
cosplayer and dreamer to do that which makes them happy.
With Dragon Ball Z being his most notable works, he continued to do many other one shot
pieces and illustrated for others as well. He will forever be remembered, now who is joining me
to collect the dragon balls cause Shenron has some work to do?
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