Akira Toriyama

Life

Akira Toriyama was born on April 5, 1955, in Kiyosu, Aichi Prefecture. He drew animals and vehicles from early childhood; he remembered being overwhelmed by Disney's One Hundred and One Dalmatians and credited Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy as the source of his interest in manga. After a design-focused high school he skipped college, over his parents' objections, and spent three years designing posters at an advertising agency in Nagoya, a job he found tedious and eventually quit.

At 23, broke and borrowing from his mother, he entered a manga contest after picking up a magazine in a coffee shop. The editor Kazuhiko Torishima of Shueisha's Weekly Shōnen Jump spotted his talent in an ineligible Star Wars parody and encouraged him to keep submitting. His first published story, Wonder Island (1978), came last in the readers' survey, and a year of flops followed. Then, prodded by Torishima to try a female lead, he created Dr. Slump (1980–84), the gag manga about an inventor and his super-strong robot girl Arale. It made him a household name and won the 1981 Shogakukan Manga Award. He founded his own studio, Bird Studio (a pun on his name: tori means bird), and remained notably private; his only promotional appearance in the United States came in 2002, at the launch of the American Shonen Jump.

Toriyama died on March 1, 2024, at 68, of an acute subdural hematoma. Bird Studio announced his death on March 8 after a private family funeral. Tributes came from manga artists, from Yuji Horii, from Japan's chief cabinet secretary, and from the president of France; fans gathered in cities from Tokyo to Mexico City and Buenos Aires.

Work

Dragon Ball, begun in 1984 from a kung fu one-shot called Dragon Boy, ran in Weekly Shōnen Jump until 1995: 519 chapters in 42 volumes. It sold 159.5 million collected volumes in Japan alone, helped drive the magazine to a record circulation of 6.53 million copies in 1995, and through its anime adaptations became one of the most influential entertainment exports Japan has produced.

While drawing Dragon Ball weekly, Toriyama was recruited by Torishima to design the characters and monsters for Dragon Quest (1986), the Famicom RPG that Yuji Horii and Chunsoft were building for Enix, with music by Koichi Sugiyama. Horii wanted to translate the Western computer RPG of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord and Ultima for a mass console audience, and Toriyama's art was part of the strategy: instantly familiar to every Jump reader, it made an intimidating genre look friendly. He later admitted he had been pulled onto the project without knowing what an RPG was. His method became fixed: Horii sent rough sketches and background notes, Toriyama redrew them, and Horii approved the results. He noted that because sprites were tiny, he could afford elaborate designs as long as each had one distinguishing feature.

The most famous of those designs is the Slime, a smiling blue teardrop that became the franchise's mascot. In Japan, a person asked to draw a slime is likely to draw Toriyama's. For the North American release as Dragon Warrior in 1989, Nintendo of America replaced his manual illustrations with more conventional Western fantasy art, a telling sign of how differently the two markets pictured the genre. Toriyama designed characters, monsters, and packaging art for every main Dragon Quest game until his death.

He crossed over to Square / Square Enix for Chrono Trigger (1995), the Super Famicom project that united him with Horii, Hironobu Sakaguchi, and Nobuo Uematsu. He also designed the PlayStation fighting games Tobal No. 1 and Tobal 2 and, reuniting with Sakaguchi and Uematsu, the Xbox 360 RPG Blue Dragon (2006) for Mistwalker. Late in life he returned to Dragon Ball, working on new films from Battle of Gods (2013) onward and creating the story and character designs for the anime Dragon Ball Daima. In 2019 France made him a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Legacy

Toriyama sits at the center of the Japanese line of RPGs. With Horii and Sugiyama he helped make Dragon Quest Japan's national game, and in doing so established the template for the Japanese RPGs (JRPG): a readable hero, a party of distinct and likable companions, and monsters that are memorable rather than merely menacing. Where Yoshitaka Amano gave Final Fantasy the air of a gallery painting, Toriyama gave Dragon Quest the warmth of a Sunday comic, and the two styles framed the genre's visual range for decades.

His influence ran far beyond games. Dragon Ball's anime carried Japanese animation to audiences across Latin America, Europe, and Asia, and a generation of manga artists, from Eiichiro Oda to Masashi Kishimoto, cited him as a model. Yet in the story this museum tells, his most enduring creation may be that humble slime: a dungeon nuisance, familiar to players since the oozes of early Dungeons & Dragons, reimagined as a cheerful blue icon recognized around the world.