Chiaki Imada

Chiaki Imada was one of the quiet architects of the Dragon Ball movie era. A Toei Animation lifer who joined the studio right out of the University of Tokyo in 1946, he climbed into the producer's chair just in time to bet heavily on Akira Toriyama's new hit. He is credited as a producer on Dragon Ball: Mystical Adventure in 1988 and then rode the full wave of early Dragon Ball Z theatrical features, including The World's Strongest, The Tree of Might, Lord Slug, Cooler's Revenge, The Return of Cooler, Super Android 13!, Broly: The Legendary Super Saiyan, and Bojack Unbound.

Four of those Z movies were co-produced with Rikizō Kayano, a partnership that powered Toei's habit of twinning a new film with whatever arc the TV series was running that season. The result was a theatrical pipeline that gave fans a new Goku adventure practically every school break.

Dragon Ball was only one pillar of a long Toei career. Imada's producing credits outside Toriyama's world include anime adaptations of Candy Candy, Captain Harlock, Cyborg 009, Fist of the North Star, Galaxy Express 999, Great Mazinger vs. Getter Robo, Kinnikuman, Magical Taruruuto-kun, Manga Aesop Monogatari, and Saint Seiya, plus more artful work like Swan Lake and Taro the Dragon Boy. That is essentially a greatest-hits shelf of late-Shōwa and early-Heisei anime, and it paid for the studio's willingness to keep backing Toriyama's properties.

He eventually rose to president of Toei Animation, which meant that by the time the 1990s Dragon Ball Z films were breaking box office records, the man writing the checks was the same man who had green-lit their earliest siblings. Few producers in anime history get to shepherd a single franchise across that many titles.

Chiaki Imada was born on July 20, 1923, in Higashi-Hiroshima. He passed away on June 23, 2006, at the age of eighty-two from pneumonia, closing out a career that had run almost exactly alongside the postwar rise of Japanese animation itself. By then Dragon Ball had become a global juggernaut, the Z films he had produced were circulating in dozens of languages, and new generations were discovering Broly, Cooler, and Bojack on home video.

For Dragon Ball fans, his name rarely comes up first when the topic of theatrical movies is raised. That is probably how he liked it. Producers of his kind did their work by clearing space for directors, animators, and writers to chase Toriyama's ideas across a big screen, and the long shadow of the Z movie library is the clearest proof that he was very good at his job.