Preserve the Original Film Grain, Restore the Audio Properly, and Stop Cropping the Image

For decades, Dragon Ball has remained one of the most influential anime franchises in the world. Fans have supported the series across television broadcasts, VHS tapes, DVDs, Blu-rays, streaming services, theatrical releases, manga editions, games, merchandise, and countless international releases.

Yet fans still do not have what should be one of the simplest ways to celebrate that legacy: a truly definitive high-definition restoration of the original animated series that respects how the material was actually photographed and presented.

We are asking the companies responsible for preserving and distributing Dragon Ball to produce a proper archival remaster of the franchise—one built around preservation rather than aggressive digital alteration.

Specifically, we ask for:

• The original aspect ratio, with no cropping. Do not cut away the top and bottom of a 4:3 image merely to fill a modern 16:9 television. The original composition should remain intact.
• Natural film grain preservation. Film grain is not dirt or an error that needs to be scrubbed away. Excessive digital noise reduction can erase line detail, textures, backgrounds, shading, and the character of the original photography. Scan the best surviving film elements at high resolution and preserve their natural photographic structure.
• High-quality original audio. Preserve and restore the best available Japanese audio masters rather than relying unnecessarily on degraded generations of older broadcast or home-video sources. Where superior archival audio survives, it should be properly transferred, synchronized, and presented losslessly.
• Lossless audio options for available language tracks. Important historical dubs and other surviving audio materials should receive the best treatment their sources permit rather than being unnecessarily compressed or altered.
• Accurate color grading. A restoration should attempt to reproduce the intended appearance of the surviving film elements instead of applying excessive saturation, crushed blacks, artificial sharpening, or revisionist color processing.
• Minimal destructive processing. Avoid excessive DNR, edge enhancement, artificial sharpening, frame interpolation, indiscriminate AI processing, or other techniques that manufacture detail by destroying or replacing genuine photographic information.
• Proper archival scanning. Whenever surviving materials permit, return to the best-generation film elements and perform modern high-resolution scans rather than repeatedly processing an old video master.
• Transparent restoration documentation. Tell fans what elements were used, what resolution they were scanned at, what restoration was performed, which audio sources survive, and where unavoidable limitations exist.

This Is About Preservation, Not Nostalgia

Fans are not asking for scratches, damage, instability, or deterioration to be preserved simply because they are old.

Restoration should repair genuine damage.

But restoration and revision are not the same thing.

Dust can be removed without erasing legitimate grain. Film instability can be corrected without radically changing composition. Color fading can be addressed without turning the image into something it never was. Audio can be cleaned carefully without destroying its natural characteristics.

Most importantly, an image originally composed for 4:3 presentation should not lose significant visual information merely so that it fills a widescreen television.

Black bars are not missing picture.

Cropping is missing picture.

Film Grain Is Part of the Image

One of the most persistent misconceptions surrounding older animation is that visible grain automatically represents poor image quality.

It does not.

Traditional animation photographed onto film naturally contains grain. A high-quality film restoration will often reveal that structure more clearly because modern scanning can preserve information that older video transfers could not.

Aggressively removing grain can remove genuine detail along with it. Fine linework becomes softer. Background paintings lose texture. Shading becomes flatter. Characters can acquire unnaturally smooth surfaces.

A restoration should make Dragon Ball look like exceptionally well-preserved film animation—not like animation created digitally decades later.

Preserve the Entire Frame

The original television animation was composed around a 4:3 frame.

Cropping that image to 16:9 does not magically modernize the animation. It removes parts of the composition.

Animators and directors made decisions about where characters appeared, how backgrounds were framed, how attacks crossed the image, and how visual information was distributed throughout that original space.

Those compositions deserve preservation.

Viewers who own widescreen televisions are perfectly capable of watching 4:3 material with pillarboxing. Modern displays should adapt to historical artwork; historical artwork should not have pieces removed to accommodate modern displays.

The Audio Deserves Archival Treatment Too

A definitive restoration cannot stop at the picture.

Dragon Ball has an enormous audio history encompassing Japanese performances, international dubs, music, effects, and different generations of masters. These materials deserve serious preservation.

Where high-quality original audio elements survive, they should be transferred and restored carefully. Where only limited sources remain, those limitations should be documented honestly rather than disguised through excessive processing.

Fans should receive the highest-quality, least-destructive presentation that surviving materials allow.

Give Fans a Release They Do Not Need to Replace Again

The frustrating part is that fans are willing to support a definitive release.

Collectors have repeatedly purchased Dragon Ball across multiple formats and editions. Many would gladly support another release if it were genuinely designed as an archival edition rather than another compromised presentation that fixes one problem while introducing another.

A definitive restoration could become the version preserved for future generations.

Scan the best surviving materials at archival resolution.

Preserve the original 4:3 compositions.

Keep natural film grain.

Restore damage carefully.

Respect the original colors.

Preserve the best surviving audio.

Provide lossless tracks whenever the sources permit.

Document the restoration process.

And release the result at a bitrate capable of preserving the work properly.

Dragon Ball should not merely survive because fans keep buying new versions of it.

It should be preserved.

What We Are Asking For

We respectfully ask the rights holders and distributors responsible for future Dragon Ball releases to commit to a definitive restoration program based on archival preservation standards:

• Original aspect ratio.
• No cropping.
• Proper high-resolution film scans.
• Natural grain retention.
• Faithful color reproduction.
• Minimal destructive digital processing.
• High-quality restored audio.
• Lossless audio whenever possible.
• Transparent documentation of sources and restoration methods.

Fans do not need the series artificially redesigned to resemble modern digital animation.

We want the original artwork presented as beautifully, faithfully, and completely as surviving materials make possible.

Dragon Ball changed animation history.

Its history deserves to be preserved with the same care.

Please give Dragon Ball the definitive restoration it deserves.