Toriyama Style Animation

I grew up watching Dragon Ball Z and playing all its videogames; the style immediately drew me in.

What first got me into digital art was making edits to the official promotional renders that came with the games.

I owe a big part of my journey into game art to Akira Toriyama so I wanted to pay tribute to his passing.

This is my attempt at closely reproducing his art style in an animation sequence I fondly remember from Episode 245 - Super Saiyan 3?!.

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First, a bit of preliminary work!

There’s exactly 64 shots in this sequence; 27 of which contain shots of Goku of which 21 are entirely unique and don’t make use of other shots.

I’ll be focusing on those specifically with the intention of adding the remaining shots given enough time.

Next is reference gathering; I want to showcase Toriyama’s latest art style which was perfected over decades as opposed to the style he first penned the manga with.

The key differences being rounder and less bulky proportions and the choices he’d make when approaching focused details as a way to remind the reader that Dragon Ball is rooted in comedy.

I extrapolated all the design information he’s put in his later work and made a character reference sheet for myself.

With reference in hand, it was time to get working on the shots!

Shot 01

For this shot, all I needed was a close up of Goku scaling out and 3 mouth variants; a closed, a half-open and a fully-opened mouth. These were then synced up with the audio track.

Shot 02

This shot was a bit more complex; I needed a bust, a separate face for Goku in both his normal and super saiyan state, each individual strand of the super saiyan hair, the mouth variants, a flashing in-between state, pressure lines to fade out, 3 frames for the animating aura, and an onomatopoeia to further add an impression of the manga style.