Akira Toriyama (Japanese: 鳥山 明, Hepburn: Toriyama Akira?, born April 5, 1955) is a Japanese manga artist and game artist best known for his manga series Dr. Slump (1980) and Dragon Ball (1984), as well as character designer for the Dragon Quest video games.
Dr. Slump earned Toriyama the 1981 Shogakukan Manga Award for best shōnen or shōjo manga. That year it was adapted into a successful anime series, with a second anime created in 1997, 13 years after the manga ended. His next series, Dragon Ball, would become one of the most popular and successful manga in the world. Having sold more than 200 million copies worldwide, it is Shueisha's second best-selling manga of all time and is considered one of the linchpins for what is called the "Golden Age of Jump" (mid-1980s to mid-1990s), where manga circulation was at its highest. Overseas, Dragon Ball's anime adaptations have been more successful than the manga and are credited with boosting Japanese animation's popularity in the Western world. In 2006, Japanese fans voted Dragon Ball third on a list of the Top 10 Manga of all time at the Agency for Cultural Affairs's Japan Media Arts Festival.
Toriyama admires Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy and was impressed by Walt Disney's One Hundred and One Dalmatians, which he remembers for the great art. Jackie Chan's early movies also had a noticeable influence on his stories.