Dragonball: A Series Review

Since last August, I have been posting reviews of every single episode of the original Dragonball anime. I’ve typically done three to four a week, slowly making my way through the first adventures of young Goku and his pals. It’s been a fun experience: I hadn’t watched this show at all since I was in middle school, but it has weirdly had a big impact on my life. As an adult, I’ve studied more of the cultural influences that went into Dragonball and so it was easier to catch little references here and there. If you want to read more about a specific episode, check out my instagram here.

General Overview

Dragonball started out as a manga by Akira Toriyama. It was later adapted into an anime, which was, I think, aired each week. I knew two things going into this: that Dragonball takes significant inspiration from the Chinese novel Journey to the West and oftentimes Toriyama would lose track of where the story was supposed to go, so he would just vamp for a few chapters. The result of this is some weirdness in pacing. When the show maintains a careful episodic structure, i.e. when it is the most like Journey to the West, featuring weird creatures and bizarre problems in exotic locales, it absolutely sings. When it runs out of runway, especially in the tournament episodes, it can be kind of a drain to watch.

Maybe before we jump into pacing, we should talk about the premise. Dragonball begins with Bulma, a young tech genius, stumbling upon a little boy in the wilderness. He has a monkey tail and lives all alone…