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 Spotlight on Akira Toriyama: Part 2

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Movies are another source for his ideas, albeit an even more subliminal one than his on-the-street observations. Toriyama doesn't watch movies as much as let them play in the background while he works ("Subtitles aren't good for me — I can't work!"), but sometimes, little inspirations shine through. "In terms of story they're of no use," Toriyama says. "But how to show things, like explosions, where something doesn't just blow up — it might flash first, and then the sound might follow a little afterwards. Also, Jackie Chan's movies might be a reference for the rhythm of battle.

"The only other time I might use references for my art would be in drawing cars and planes," Toriyama continues. "Plastic models are useful. You can examine them from every angle when you're drawing cars." This need for detail, apparently, is part of what led to Toriyama's cute, cartoony style of drawing machines and other gadgetry. "If you want to depict something exactly the way it is, it takes a tremendous amount of time. If you don't get the details right, the inaccuracies will accumulate somewhere. But it's no problem if it's caricatured. I try to get done as quickly as possible.

"I probably have the most fun thinking up original vehicles," he continues. "I usually consider details such as how to get into them and where their engines are. When you draw a real-world car, you have to obtain some references. I'd hate to have someone point out that I'm wrong," he laughs. "But if it's something I invented, I can have it my way." In fact, this caricatured style is truly essential to the Dragon Ball world as a whole. "My manga is in the slapstick style, so if the characters are caricatured humans, then it'd be strange for everything else not to be caricatured."

Besides Dragon Ball's version of Earth, the series indulges in many adventures "off world" — on the planet Nameck, searching for the more powerful grade-up version of Earth's Dragon Balls. “I came up with the Nameck architecture and spaceships based on Piccolo [Daimao’s] throne. I really only gave thought to making the setting coherent when they went to Nameck," Toriyama claims. Another unique setting is Dragon Ball's very Asian heaven and hell, where Goku spends more than a little of the series, trying to get back to Earth. Toriyama's take, however, is far from the typical one. "God's shrine looked rather mystical, so I thought it might work to make the other place look conversely worldly. So Enma [king of the Spirit World, city of Hades] and the ogres show up wearing suits like businessmen." The Afterlife, in Toriyama's vision, is filled with references to Earthly routine—from street-cleaning trucks on Snake Way to ogres wearing T-shirts and jogging gear and souls traveling to heaven on an airplane. In explanation, Toriyama refers to a world map in the Dragon Ball illustration collection.

"This map was something I originally drew at the request of an animator, but I used this opportunity to make [the world] complete. I usually come up with the story first and then set up the world. A real manga artist would probably draw the map first and then think up the story. This might make me sound like I work without thinking, but that's not true. I do have a vague notion before coming up with the story."

playing god

In the same vain, Toriyama's approach to character design is to create characters to fit his story. In Dragon Ball, even the premise that the characters were aliens was something Toriyama just came up with at the time. "I didn't have in mind that Goku would be an alien when he had a tail or turned into a giant ape. The same for Piccolo. I came up with that when God showed up. I usually come up with some retrofitted explanation."

Likewise, Toriyama begins his character designs with the personality, filling in details as he goes. "I start with the face, and as I think up the face, I come up with the physique. After the head and body, I get a notion of a costume that would be suitable for the world he lives in, or for a fighting character, something he'd be comfortable wearing in combat. Basically, I think in monochrome — after I come up with characters, their color schemes are roughly set in my mind. Of course, they come up differently when I actually color them in on paper."

Dragon Ball aside, nowadays Toriyama is possibly even better known as a video game character designer, especially in America, where Japanese animation and comics are still only really beginning to catch on. Toriyama's characters for popular video games such as Chrono Trigger and Tobal No.1 are instantly recognizable, almost to the point of being characters that could just as easily have appeared in Dragon Ball (we know of one DBZ fan who managed to use the "customizing" feature in Tobal 2 to replicate Gotenks). Toriyama says of his adventures designing for video games that it was probably first suggested to him by his editor. "I didn't want to at first," he says, "but it did expand my horizons." On the difference between designing characters for video games and designing characters for manga or animation, Toriyama admits that "It's different," and notes that although video game characters are tiny, it's still possible to draw intricate designs.

"In manga or animation, detailed designs make for hard work, but: you don't have those restrictions with video games. You have to give them distinguishing characteristics, even when they get reduced to a few pixels. It might be the same for animation. You'd have a dark character, a brown character, or even a purple character. For my own manga, I like to avoid the effort of using screen tones, but in animation, the very same thing has to be done to distinguish the characters. In video games, they might have costumes that I'd have a hard time keeping up with in manga. For animation, I have to come up with a compromise that won't tax the animators while still resembling the video game.

Akira Toriyama interview segments excerpted from the Dragon Ball World Guide book series, published by Shueisha, Inc.