Dragon Ball is an instant classic, no matter where in the world we find ourselves. The story goes that Goku and Bulma first stepped onto American soil in 1995, almost ten years after the original broadcast in Japan. With its twentieth anniversary on the horizon, a certain Tim Tapp from the portal Seven Star Re-Animate launched a great challenge in November 2014: to completely reanimate an episode of Dragon Ball. More than 250 animators joined the project, and today you can see the final result.
One detail to highlight about Dragon Ball is undoubtedly the irregularity with which it was released. There are countries where Dragon Ball Z was seen first (or its movies), while in other cases they decided to air only the first saga (the one of Emperor Pilaf) and then abandon it completely. Despite all those missteps, no one denies that Dragon Ball (and here I refer to Toriyama's entire work) was one of the great ambassadors that enabled the massive arrival of anime to the West, and it still moves legions of fans, as demonstrated by its new movies and Dragon Ball Super, which is about to cross the barrier of 50 episodes (episode 48 premieres this Sunday). What brings us here today is a kind of tribute, a very complex project that required a year of development, and in which more than 250 animators took part: Dragon Ball Reanimate.
No, there is no mistake. What you just saw is a "remake" of episode 8 of Dragon Ball, combining very different frames and styles (including jumps from 2D to 3D), while keeping English audio as the base. According to the organizer of this project, whose name is Tim Tapp, the hardest part was not coordinating the work of so many animators, but reaching a kind of middle ground between the two existing versions of the episode. The first thirteen episodes of Dragon Ball were aired in 1995 across the pond, but Funimation's re-release in 2001 introduced some changes, and a different dub.
To tell the truth, Dragon Ball Reanimate is not the first project of this kind, but was inspired by another called Moon Animate Make-Up, which also had more than 250 animators working on a Sailor Moon episode for a period of ten months. Tapp said that if "the demand is there" he has some ideas to make another, however, one must wait for a possible response from Toriyama and company. Technically this could qualify as parody, but there is the audio issue...
