In the world of Dragon Ball, a mainstay of popular culture from the 1980s to the present day, the dragon-god Shenron is capable of granting almost any wish, including restoring life to the dead. But he cannot resurrect the person who created him. Akira Toriyama, the inventive mangaka who dreamed up this character, died at the age of 68 on March 1, 2024, according to a statement from his publishing house and studio on Friday, March 8.
From 1984 to 1995, when the flagship series was first published, Toriyama hid behind his dragon-djinn character, shunning public appearances. The omnipotent god was a kind of projection of his own pleasure as a demiurge. He was a writer who never took as much pleasure as when he was improvising new plot twists or catching readers off-guard, even if it meant the death of their favorite characters.
But Toriyama loved all of his heroes, and slipped a little of himself into each of them. He was Son Goku, a naive character with incredible stubbornness. He was Yamcha, a solitary pleasure-seeker with a passion for motorcycles and freedom. And he was also Master Roshi (aka the Turtle Hermit), a voyeuristic, reclusive, libidinous man with a questionable respect for women (in his very masculine universe, Toriyama goes so far as to literally forget the existence of one of his rare heroines in the middle of a narrative arc).
An imaginary world inspired by Disney and Astro Boy
The star mangaka had other battles to fight: denouncing land-grabbing property developers. At the height of the financial bubble in the early 1990s, they inspired one of his cruelest and most iconic antagonists, the alien emperor Frieza. He liked to value salt-of-the-earth, rural characters like himself.
Akira Toriyama was born on April 5, 1955 in Kiyosu, a suburb of Nagoya in the mountains of central Japan, into a conservative family. Raised with hundreds of pets – dogs, cats and, above all, birds – he fell in love with American animation when he saw the Disney Studios film 101 Dalmatians (1961), which gave him a taste for drawing. A strong-willed, even stubborn child, he sketched the animals and objects of his dreams, such as a horse, monkeys and, later, a bicycle, with perseverance and meticulousness.
It was when he was a teenager that his imagination took shape. He was a jack-of-all-trades, fascinated by the rounded architecture and optimistic futuristic universe of Astro Boy, a character made by the "god of manga" Osamu Tezuka. He was captivated by the new Hollywood cinema and the power of its universes, as well as by model-making, mechanics and weapons. And he found a guilty pleasure in the kitsch of tokusatsu, those lycra-suited series mixing martial arts and hideous aliens.
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