Sai Sui: Why was she not included in this movie? She was never a member of the cast. I just wanted to keep the character’s story short.”
The first movie, titled Dragon Hunter, went on to gross $40 million in Japan and went on to be a hit overseas. In 2005, the studio partnered with Shueisha for the second film, Dragon Ball Z, and went on to gross $170 million in its home market for only the second time.
Kanzenshuu
Kanzenshuu, one of Japan’s best-known manga studios, has published some of the first manga adaptations to feature an Asian-American female character.
Kanzenshuu also wrote and illustrated a number of successful animated shows, including the anime series Sankarea, which ran for six TV seasons from 1992-1996, and Yu Yu Hakusho, which ran on Cartoon Network from 1999-2008. In 2001, it released the series Dragon Ball Z: Supersonic Warriors, which premiered in Japan in 1997 and debuted on TV in 2010 under the title Dragon Ball Super.
Cinema-G
Japan’s first overseas-made anime movie, Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli, had many Japanese fans in their first days of release. For example, as noted on the Miyazaki Wiki, by the time of its release in April of 1999, the film had generated over 10 million votes on its official site. According to Miyazaki’s own words, the studio’s production team was made up of “the best and most experienced and talented female animators in the Japanese animation industry,” and that their job was to “produce such movies as the Miyazaki films, including the Princess Mononoke movie, Shingeki no Kyojin movie, and My Neighbor Totoro.”
According to the Cine-Asia Review, the new Star Wars trilogy was influenced by Miyazaki’s work, and some fans believe that he may have even written it. Miyazaki said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in 2004 that he wrote the films “on a whim” before he started directing them in 1997. Some fans believe that he may have even worked on the trilogy, especially for Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones (2001).
One of the earliest movie titles to feature an Asian-American female heroine was Princess Mononoke (1997). The Miyazaki-