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Updated Friday, March 8, 2024-14:05

  • Akira Toriyama, the man from Dragon Ball, dies at 68

  • Niponmania How Japanese culture

Akira Toriyama

, the man of 260 million copies and billions of television viewers thanks to

Dragon Ball

, has died at the age of 68,

as a figure who partly explains contemporary popular culture

, including its commercial structure, despite the fact that his work, shameless, hypersexualized and Tartinian before Tarantino, seems to us today from another era.

Goju Semiotics

Umberto Eco must be the most cited source in academic studies on

Dragon Ball

, not because Akira Toriyama replicated the themes of

The Name of the Rose

, but because the Italian philosopher's essays on semiotics serve to identify the structure of the series.

Which, in short, is that of the mythical journey of the hero, the same scheme as the

Iliad

only taken, as its author explained, from Indian and, above all, Chinese traditions.

Journey to the West

, a central novel in Chinese tradition, written in the 16th century and attributed to Wu Cheng'en, was the inspiration behind Dragon Ball.

There is another Japanese concept, that of

kishtenketsu

, that functions as a template for these mythical travel stories: someone sets out for a purpose that does not always matter much, and, along the way, acquires layers of knowledge and maturity.

Not many, in Goku's case.

mixed product

The success of

Dragon Ball

can be intuited with the naked eye in any image of adult Goku: the writing of his expression is synthetic and minimalist, as corresponds to the tradition of Japanese illustration.

On the other hand, his torso and his arms tend towards hypertrophied hyperrealism, they are those of a superhero from the American tradition.

Like many of the Japanese writers and artists who have found success in Western culture, Akira Toriyama was a child of Japan's openness to the world after the World War and was exposed to European and American comics.

His characters are mixed race, they are part Japanese and part

gaijin.

The Japanese animation known until then had not made this mixture: it was at the age of Astroboy

's innocence

or, if anything, it had encountered European art in the style of De Chirico or Richter (

Akira, Adolf...

) and tended to high culture.

Counterculture for children

In

Dragon Ball

and its world, not only DC, Marvel and manga tradition are mixed.

There is another element unusual until then in animation more or less for children whose origin can be traced: humor.

At the time,

Dragon Ball

was received, above all, as a comic product of joyful barbarism.

The humor appeared in the form of corrosive acid, as if it came from the countercultural fanzines of the 70s, from the texts of the S

pornography magazines

of the great exposure, from B movies and martial arts films... Goku and company, in some way, appealed to both the children who watched

Mazinger Z

and the readers of

Batman

and the fans in Spain of graphic humor, whether that of

Mortadelo and Filemón

or that of the magazines of the transition in the style of

El Papus

and

Thursday

.

Toriyama's great success consisted, perhaps, in narrating this rather degenerate world through Goku, a character who is deep down innocent and noble, a normal boy if it weren't for two or three things that happen to him.

collage saga

The outline of the mythical journey that we attributed to

Dragon Ball

had the advantage that it was a very light structure that only needed to be populated with the ideas of its author, a man of apparently inexhaustible ingenuity.

Today, any book dedicated to the mythomania of

Dragon Ball

tends to be a dictionary of subplots and extravagances: "the best characters in

Dragon Ball

; the races with which Goku associates; the crazy gadgets he uses to continue." his trip; the map of the places he visits: the best fights he gets into"...

Dragon Ball

became something similar to a snowball seen under the microscope that is remified infinite times in structures that are remified into structures that branch out into... It became a fascination of fascinations.

Today, that way of relating to readers/viewers has become a part of the landscape, from

Game of Thrones

to

Star Wars,

because it promises for its producers to be a goose that lays golden eggs that gives birth to new golden goose.

Dragon Ball

arrived first.