Dragon Ball fans with deep pockets are being given a chance to own a piece of the anime's history.
Multiple animation cels from the classic Dragon Ball Z anime are now taking bids on the premium auction site Heritage Auctions. Cels of Gotenks and the wish-granting dragon Shenlong are currently receiving bids in the hundreds, but a frame from the series' Cell Saga is, appropriately enough, commanding the highest value. The colored cel includes its background and features Super Saiyan Goku readying his trademark special attack, the Kamehameha. Bidding is currently at $6,250 USD, with about four days remaining in the auction.
While the Dragon Ball cels are already expensive and will probably only get pricier with time, they are still far from the highest prices that anime cels have sold for. Heritage Auctions previously sold a My Neighbor Totoro animation cel, which featured an image of the Studio Ghibli movie's central protagonists standing in the rain while they await the arrival of the Catbus, for $84,000 USD. The site has also sold a cel from Katsuhiro Otomo's cyberpunk classic Akira for $78,000. While no cel from a Japanese anime has managed to reach the record-breaking price set by an auction for a hand-painted, classic Mickey Mouse animation cel, which sold for a whopping $420,000 USD, prices on the collectibles are rising as international interest and nostalgia for classic anime has grown.
Dragon Ball originally debuted in 1984. The series was very loosely inspired by the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West and was created by artist and writer Akira Toriyama. In the almost 40 years since the series first debuted, it has since become one of the most successful and influential anime and manga franchises of all time, with over 260 million copies in circulation around the world. The series remains popular to this day, and continues to fuel an entire industry of branded apparel, countless tie-in video games, and other licensed goods. Goku's adventures have continued with the Dragon Ball Super manga, which is supervised by Toriyama and drawn by an artist known as Toyotarou, whom Toriyama has named as his official successor. Dragon Ball Super has become a hit in its own right, spawning an TV anime adaptation that ran from 2015 - 2018, as well as multiple animated theatrical features. The latest movie to be based on the series, Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero, is scheduled to be released in Japan in 2022, with an international release promised shortly afterwards.
Source: Heritage Auctions
