Dragon Ball Review

Toriyama draws motion better than almost anyone, and the reason is restraint. Backgrounds drop away, silhouettes stay simple, and a punch travels across a page on a legible arc rather than behind a wall of effects. That clarity is why fights running for volumes never turn to soup. The first half is a picaresque adventure comedy with a genuinely strange sense of humour and a world stitched together from Journey to the West, kung fu cinema and Toriyama's gadget fixation, and it is funnier than its reputation suggests.

The shift to sustained combat invented the escalation structure every subsequent shonen inherited, transformations and power ceilings included, which is both the achievement and the origin of the genre's worst habit. Characters are archetypes drawn with enormous charm rather than depth, and the later arcs sideline everyone who is not a Saiyan. Pacing across the Namek stretch is famously indulgent. Almost nothing here is subtle, and almost everything here worked so well it became the default.