Akira Toriyama died on March 1, 2024. He was 68 years old. The cause was acute subdural hematoma. He left behind a wife, two children, a studio named after the bird hidden inside his surname, and a body of creative work so vast it warped the gravitational center of an entire medium. He also left behind something more fragile: a finished story, handwritten and drawn, sitting inside the production pipeline at Toei Animation, waiting to be turned into light and sound.

That story was Dragon Ball Daima.

The Accidental Masterwork

Toriyama was never supposed to be deeply involved. Executive producer Akio Iyoku, president of the newly formed Capsule Corporation Tokyo, originally planned to have the artist review the project casually rather than build it from the ground up. But Toriyama grew more and more enthusiastic, and in the end Iyoku asked him to create most of its story. The result: Toriyama wrote the entire narrative and drew most of the characters, from background bar patrons to the monsters roaming the Demon Realm, the planes, and the mecha. Iyoku was most surprised by Warp-sama’s design, a goldfish-like vessel capable of traveling between universes. “Only he could have come up with” something like that, Iyoku said.

The project had originally been conceived as a web-only production along the lines of Super Dragon Ball Heroes. It was Toriyama’s snowballing involvement that elevated it to a full broadcast anime. At the Dragon Ball Genkidamatsuri event in January 2026, Masako Nozawa, Koichi Yamadera, and Iyoku himself appeared on stage to herald the franchise’s next chapter. But the real weight of that stage belonged to what had already been completed and aired: the twenty episodes of Daima, every one of them finished before cameras ever rolled.

A Sealed Capsule

This is the detail that transforms Daima from a pleasant late-career entry into something closer to a cultural artifact. According to director Yoshitaka Yashima, speaking in the soundtrack booklet, Toriyama completed the entire story before production began. “Toriyama-sensei wrote the story himself,” Yashima said. “He had already completed it at the start, so our job was to bring his ideas to life.” Toei’s role was execution. Toriyama’s was authorship, total and unborrowed.

A 40th Anniversary Special Video short from Toei Animation, directed by Naoki Miyahara with a score by Hans Zimmer, traced Goku’s development from Toriyama’s earliest sketches onward. But the most moving piece of archival work is less cinematic. Fans noticed that the opening and ending animations of Daima feature a recurring motif: a white bird flying near Goku. Toriyama’s name contains the Japanese word for “bird.” His company is called Bird Studio. The symbol was impossible to miss and impossible to discuss without grief.

The Akira Toriyama Archive, hosted on Dragon Ball’s official website, now posts hard-to-find illustrations several times per week, each available for a limited 24-hour window. The sketches are a rare window into Toriyama’s creative process, especially coveted given his passing. But this model of ephemeral digital release has drawn sharp criticism from physical media advocates and preservationists who argue that these materials deserve permanent, museum-quality archival rather than algorithmic content drops designed to generate engagement. The comparison to how Studio Ghibli or the Walt Disney Animation Research Library treats its founders’ papers is not flattering to Toei or Capsule Corporation Tokyo.

The Custody Battle

To understand why Toriyama’s final creative materials sit in such a precarious position, you have to understand the corporate fracture that preceded his death. At the heart of the conflict is the departure of Akio Iyoku, the former head of Shueisha’s Dragon Ball Room. Iyoku, known for his close relationship with Toriyama, left and went independent in May 2023, taking several subordinates with him to establish Capsule Corporation Tokyo. Relations between Shueisha and Toriyama were heavily damaged, prompting him and Iyoku to start their own company. With them went the rights to all Dragon Ball anime and video game productions, while Shueisha retained the rights to Dragon Ball’s manga. Now overseen by two separate and practically warring entities, legal complexities surrounding the franchise have risen to the surface.

Toriyama was not happy with what had happened to Iyoku, and Shueisha knew it. A chairperson from the company even went to Toriyama’s home to try to secure the rights to the franchise, but was unsuccessful. Then Toriyama died, and the situation grew murkier. The division of rights has led to a legal and production deadlock. Shueisha controls the manga, but Capsule Corporation Tokyo has the authority to produce new anime content. Without an agreement between both parties, adapting the manga’s story arcs into anime has been complicated, if not impossible.

The Genkidamatsuri event in January offered what looked like a thaw. Dragon Ball Super: Beerus, a new TV anime project, was officially announced and is set to premiere in Fall 2026. The announcement was made on January 25, 2026, at the Dragon Ball Genkidamatsuri event celebrating the franchise’s 40th anniversary. Dragon Ball Super: The Galactic Patrol was also confirmed, a new anime adapting the Galactic Patrol Prisoner Arc from the manga starring Goku and Vegeta against Moro the Planet-Eater. A new game, Project AGE 1000, will launch in 2027. Toriyama was working on it before his death and created the new character for it.

On the surface, this looks like a franchise roaring back to life. But the tension between Shueisha and Capsule Corporation Tokyo has not been publicly resolved. The result of that divide was already visible in 2024’s Daima, an entirely original anime series separate from anything done in the manga’s version of events. The question hanging over every new announcement is the same one that haunts every posthumous project in every creative field: whose hand is on the wheel now?

The Last Wave

Toriyama’s final recorded contribution to the Dragon Ball manga was small and enormous at the same time. He directed his protégé Toyotarou to redraw the ending of chapter 103 of Dragon Ball Super, so that a departing Piccolo appears to wave back at the reader. It was published on March 20, 2024, less than a month after Toriyama’s death. A short tribute ran at the bottom of the page.

The Daima finale aired on February 28, 2025, with the Japanese broadcast on Fuji TV crossing midnight into March 1, exactly one year after Toriyama died. Whether this was planned or coincidental, no one at Toei has confirmed. It didn’t matter. The timing spoke for itself.

There is a version of this story where Toriyama’s sketches, outlines, character sheets, and narrative blueprints end up preserved the way Osamu Tezuka’s manuscripts are preserved, or the way Hayao Miyazaki’s storyboards are held at the Ghibli Museum: with permanence, with care, with the understanding that these are not content but cultural patrimony. There is another version where they become leverage in a corporate negotiation, parceled out in 24-hour windows, reduced to collectible moments on a content calendar. We are living, right now, in the space between those two futures.

Iyoku explained at Genkidamatsuri that the Beerus anime is based on a story scenario originally created by Toriyama, and that the production team made a deliberate effort to stay more faithful to Toriyama’s original draft. That’s a good sentence. It’s also a sentence that only means something if the original drafts survive, intact and accessible, long after the people currently fighting over them are gone.

Toriyama once said, in a message displayed posthumously at the 2024 Tokyo Anime Awards Festival, that he had gotten “deeply involved with the project without realizing it.” That’s the purest description of how an artist works. You walk in to give a little advice. You leave having written the whole thing. The question now is whether the people holding what he wrote understand what they have. Not an asset. Not IP. A transmission from someone who isn’t coming back.

Further reading: Dragon Ball Super: Beerus official announcement · Kanzenshuu Translations Archive · CBR: Toriyama Completed the Daima Story