Dragonball's pioneering fight aesthetics

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Polyphase Avatron
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Dragonball's pioneering fight aesthetics

Post by Polyphase Avatron » Wed Apr 28, 2021 3:14 am

Has anyone noticed that the style pioneered by the Dragonball franchise has been adopted by a huge amount of series featuring super powered fantasy fights?

Pretty much every shounen battle anime nowadays uses this kind of thing, from Yu Yu Hakusho to Naruto to Bleach to My Hero Academia, etc. They all took cues from Dragonball (and Fist of the North Star and Saint Seiya, but I think to a lesser extent).

Not only anime, but even western cartoons.

I'm talking about visual tropes like:

- Characters appearing and disappearing via super speed, only visible for brief periods
- Views of fights from a long distance being shown as a series of explosions/shockwaves randomly moving about
- Views of fights from a long distance being shown as streaks of colored light flying and colliding with each other
- Beam struggles
- Characters dodging attacks by just barely moving their body or head, wearing a bored/casual expression
- Characters blocking/deflecting rapid attacks shown by reusing animation frames
- Characters using afterimages/teleportation to appear and reappear behind each other in succession
- A character being caught in an explosion and leaving a large amount of dust, then it clears to show they are unharmed
- Rapid punches/kicks being shown as a character appearing to have many hands/arms at once
- Powering up with energy/electric auras
- Creating/manipulating large spheres/beams to attack
- Punches/physical blows creating shockwaves as characters clash

Most, if not all, of these things are a lot older than Dragonball, of course, but Dragonball was probably the 'Trope Codifier' for them, at least in the west. You never really saw much of this kind of thing in western media until the late 90s when Dragonball became popular, and everyone was trying to imitate it.

Here are some examples from western cartoons (examples from anime would be too numerous to list):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voxy9WLXcyM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ytx4YHE4V80 (2:25 - 2:45 is especially notable)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Az9CbRZO04E (excuse the bad music and sped up animation, best to probably watch it muted)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JidMrhvEs5Y (relevant part starts at around 1:26)
Cool stuff that I upload here because Youtube will copyright claim it: https://vimeo.com/user60967147

DragonBallFoodie
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Location: Zambia, Southern Africa

Re: Dragonball's pioneering fight aesthetics

Post by DragonBallFoodie » Sat May 01, 2021 7:10 pm

"Popularizing" could be a more apt word than "pioneering".

But yeah, thanks to DB's massive impact across the animation/anime/shonen world many successors since then have used DB's methods.
"Don't take pleasure in destruction!" / "I will not let you destroy my world!"
A true hero goes beyond not the limits of power, but the limits that divide countries and people.

CaJae10
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Re: Dragonball's pioneering fight aesthetics

Post by CaJae10 » Sun May 02, 2021 1:33 am

Correct me if I'm wrong but, DB was unique for its time that everyone would want to copy it. Everything that made DB unique became cliché. It's kind of silly but I was actually inspired by DB for a while, I used the same set of rules for the universe and changed it to fit my story.

I eventually got bored and forgot about the story I made; I put a lot of effort into something that I was only doing for fun.

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