Norihito Sumitomo

When Toei Animation decided to bring Goku back to theaters in 2013 with Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods, the project needed a new musical voice that could sit alongside the franchise's heritage without imitating it. That job went to Norihito Sumitomo, a Berklee trained composer who had spent years scoring Japanese TV dramas and live action films. The Battle of Gods soundtrack introduced the grand, orchestral, character driven style that now defines the modern era, and Sumitomo has been the franchise's principal composer ever since.

He returned for Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection 'F' in 2015, then took on the weekly demands of the Dragon Ball Super television series, writing leitmotifs for new figures like Beerus, Whis, Hit, Jiren, and Zamasu. He followed that with scores for Dragon Ball Super: Broly in 2018 and Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero in 2022, meaning every major modern Dragon Ball project of the past decade carries his name on the music credit.

Sumitomo was born in Tokushima and trained in the United States at Berklee College of Music. He first built a reputation as an elite saxophone and electronic wind instrument player, earning comparisons to Michael Brecker, Branford Marsalis, and Kirk Whalum, and appearing in Billboard as a guest performer on an album by Italian pianist Gianni Nosenchik that also featured Ryuichi Sakamoto. In 2000 he toured Asia as the saxophonist in Bob James's touring band alongside drummer Billy Kilson and keyboardist Charles Blenzig.

He pivoted to screen scoring in the 2000s with a steady run of Japanese TV movies and dramas, and in 2008 wrote his first anime score for Shikabane Hime: Aka. The combination of jazz vocabulary, orchestral craft, and electronic timbres he had developed over those years became his trademark when he inherited Dragon Ball. His other credits include Firefighter Daigo: Rescuer in Orange, Thermae Romae, and music supervision on Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva, and he also scored Dragon Ball Z Kai: The Final Chapters, covering episodes 98 through 167 of the Buu saga recut.

Sumitomo's Dragon Ball music is notable for how much room it gives the characters. Where earlier scores often leaned on repeating cues, his approach writes dedicated themes for new figures and reprises them across films and series, so a returning villain or ally carries their own musical signature from one project to the next. The Dragon Ball Super original soundtracks, released in two volumes, showcase this architecture in full.

More than a decade into his tenure, he has become the third great composer in Dragon Ball's history, standing between Shunsuke Kikuchi's 20th century foundation and whatever comes next. For fans who came to the series through Super, his cues are simply what Dragon Ball sounds like.