Dragon Ball's Goku shows off in a new video from the stop-motion animation master at the Animist YouTube channel.
Animist's latest work sees Goku practicing some flips and spinning kicks before smiling at the camera. Numerous other Dragon Ball characters can be seen in the background watching the Saiyan's martial arts exhibition, including Krillin and Piccolo, as well as the villains Frieza and Majin Buu. The star of one of the animator's previous videos, a figure of Vegeta in his regular Super Saiyan form, can also been seen. In addition to the animation itself, Animist also posted a lengthy making-of video that shows off all the painstaking effort and attention to detail that went into creating the short clip.
More of the animator's work can be seen on their YouTube channel. In addition to their latest video, they have produced numerous other Dragon Ball shorts, including an animation of Vegeta practicing his aerial combos and another short that looks back at a young Goku's original adventures with Bulma. Animist has also produced stop-motion shorts based on a variety of other Japanese anime, manga and video game franchises, including The Legend of Zelda, Jujutsu Kaisen and Demon Slayer.
The new stop-motion video is reminiscent of the original teaser trailer for the next Dragon Ball movie, Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero. The movie was unveiled in 2021 with a short teaser video that similarly showed Goku getting warmed up before settling into his iconic fighting stance. Super Hero will be the first movie in the series to be completely CG animated, as the film uses a unique shading and animation style that tries to replicate the look of Akira Toriyama's hand-drawn art with polygonal 3D models. The movie is scheduled to be released in Japan on April 22. An international release for the Saiyan's latest adventure has yet to be announced, but the film's producers previously stated that they were working hard to ensure the gap between Super Hero's Japanese premiere and its Western release was as short as possible.
Fans may be seeing more of Goku in the near future as well, as series producer Akio Iyoku recently teased that there might be more Dragon Ball anime in 2022 beyond the new movie. Iyoku didn't announce anything concrete, but fans speculate he may have been teasing the return of the Dragon Ball Super anime, which completed its original broadcast run in 2017. Since the anime went off the air, the Dragon Ball Super manga has completed an entire arc, the Galactic Patrol Prisoner Saga, and is nearing the end of its current storyline, the Granolah the Survivor saga. Both arcs have yet to receive an animated adaptation.