‘Dragon Ball’ Animator Brings Kid Goku to Life in New Clip

A Dragon Ball Super animator treated fans to a throwback on Twitter this week with his rendition of a young Goku.

Yuya Takahashi served as a key animator and an animation director on Dragon Ball Super. He also worked on both Dragon Ball Z: Battle of The Gods and Resurrection: ‘F.’ He is even listed as key animator on the upcoming Dragon Ball Super: Broly, but he still found time to post a little just-for-fun project on Twitter.

“The practice of digital drawing,” reads the auto-translation of Takahashi’s tweet. The five-second clip shows a stunning portrayal of young Goku soaring through the air on his Flying Nimbus cloud. He went all the way back to Goku’s original purple Gi, complete with orange wrist bands and, presumably, the white belt tied neatly in a knot.

The clip is short, but it has many moving parts. Goku’s tail twitches behind him in a seemingly subconscious way, and his hair is pulled back by the force of the wind. The Power Pole rattles against him — a nice touch that was never really put into the original series — and the Nimbus cloud itself is in constant motion, just as it was in early episodes of Dragon Ball.

Fans loved seeing Takahashi take on this Dragon Ball classic look. The animator has become a veteran in his field in just a couple of years, taking on some of the biggest properties there are in anime. Yet through it all, he has clearly retained the passion and drive to sit down and whip up a Goku clip on his day off.

Takahashi has shared a number of other drawings and clips in the past several weeks, many of them centering around Dragon Ball. He is not alone, as the excitement for Dragon Ball Super: Broly has reignited a passionate group of fan artists. Takahashi has done everything from simple sketches of Goku in profile to Goku and Gogeta in full color. He has also retweeted fans who color or ink his sketches.

The hype shows no signs of slowing down. Dragon Ball Super: Broly has made some massive promises for an anime film, and fans expect it to deliver. For those that don’t recall, Broly is a non-canonical villain who starred in three previous Dragon Ball Z movies in the early 1990s. A maniacal Saiyan with an ancient, legendary power, he is massively popular among fans. With Dragon Ball Super: Broly, his origin will be completely rebooted in an original story written by Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama himself.

The movie hits theaters in Japan on Dec. 14. It is expected in the United States sometime in January of 2019, though the exact date has not been set yet.