Throughout Dragon Ball, there are many spectacular scenes in which Son-Goku and his opponents throw wild attacks at each other. Yet, it was a teleportation scene that made an animator sweat.
Who is the animator? Tadayoshi Yamamuro is the character designer of Dragon Ball Super and Dragon Ball Heroes. He is also responsible for many fighters from Dragon Ball Z. By now, he has made it to Chief Animator and Illustrator of Dragon Ball.
The Japanese animator has a long-standing career. Thus, it is all the more exciting that in 2019, he revealed which was the hardest scene he had to draw. The scene is related to his favorite character, Janemba.
Actually, there would have been an end after Dragon Ball Z:
The hardest scene from Dragon Ball was a teleportation scene
Which scene is it about? In the movie Dragon Ball Z: The Movie – Fusion from 1995, a small boy mutates into a demon named Janemba. The boy forgot to replace the tanks of a soul purification machine and, after its explosion, is overwhelmed with evil energy.
The villain teleports by dissolving into many small cubes that have colorful edges. For a special effect, these colors even change. In a tweet from DBPerfectShots on X, you can watch the scenes in which Janemba teleports.
As Yamamuro explains, this was the hardest scene he had to draw in his entire career. Nowadays, he would create this animation using CGI. Back then, the entire movie was still hand-drawn.
Why would it be created with CGI today? CGI is a technique that allows for the creation or enhancement of animations on a computer. Often, this saves the animators valuable time that they need for other tasks.
The CGI technique was first used in the 1970s and gradually became established in the 1980s and 1990s. Dragon Ball Z was in the transition phase and was still entirely hand-drawn.
If the movie had been released just a few years later, this time-consuming scene would have been created with CGI.
Even Akira Toriyama, the mangaka of Dragon Ball, wanted to save as much time as possible when drawing. Therefore, he decided to make the Super Saiyan blonde, so he didn’t have to fill in the hair: Dragon Ball Z: Son-Goku has blonde hair when he becomes a Super Saiyan – There is a good reason for this
