For decades, the gateway to the works of Akira Toriyama in the US has been Dragon Ball Z – the point where Toriyama’s opus shifted gears from gag manga with fighting to shonen fight manga. In 2024, the year in which he sadly passed, we got an anime adaptation of another work, one which I think serves as a better jumping on point to Toriyama as an artist – Sand Land.
Sand Land has so much different from Dragon Ball Z – our principal character, rather than being a scrappy kid is an old guy, Rao, (though we have a scrappy “kid” in the form of Beelzebub). The setting moves from the Chinese watercolor painting inspired landscapes of DBZ to a desert. Also, while the series has some of his signature comedy – the desert bandits called “The Swimmers” running around a place with no water while dressed in speedos, “Poop Cactus” (cactus that looks like poop and emits a gas that smells like it too), and more than a few other bits of scatological humor – it also doesn’t have the more horndog elements that makes the original Dragonball a tough recommendation now (nobody gets sexually harassed here).
Also, the series has the mechanical designs that were a signature element of Toriyama’s work, and it’s only recently he got his due for in the US – tanks, airships, and more than a couple of super-weapons, plus a couple of cyborgs flesh out the world of this story. And on top of all of that, we do get our fair share of action scenes, even if they’re not as big, flashy, and property-damage-inspiring as the fights from Dragon Ball Z. Arguably the lack of property damage helps make the story more approachable, as it gives the fights a bit of a sense of slapstick – while they don’t undermine the stakes of the fights, they do keep them from feeling too serious.
And then there’s the plot itself – the series is divided into two main arcs. One is Rao heading in search of a water source, joined by Beelzebub and his sidekick, Thief – which ends up putting the trio in conflict with the King of Sand Land, and ultimately liberating a source that the king had been hoarding. The second has the trio traveling to the northern land of Forest Land, where they have to contend with a rogue angel who had taken over the country, teaming up with a young freedom fighter, Ann.
The animation for the show is really solid – in particular, there’s a foot-chase scene between Belz and one of the Swimmers that is tremendously well done, conveying a great sense of the slapstick behind a similar footchase scene from Kung Fu Hustle.
With Toriyama’s passing, sadly we’re not going to get more opportunities for short comedy series like this in the future, but it makes for a good thing to point at and say, when someone asks “Outside of Dragon Ball, what was Toriyama’s work like?” – you can say “Like this.”
Sand Land is available for streaming on Hulu (in the US) and Disney+ (outside the US).
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