Seventy metres of Shenron, with a rollercoaster running through him.
That is the render Qiddiya has been showing since March 2024, when its investment company launched the world’s first Dragon Ball park in Qiddiya City under a long-term partnership with Toei Animation. Half a million square metres, seven themed zones for the seven dragon balls, more than thirty attractions. Kame House, Capsule Corporation, Beerus’s planet. The official Dragon Ball site has since posted that construction is starting.
And this week the idea got a second address. On 24 August 2026 Emmanuel Macron and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced roughly €6 billion of Saudi money — quoted variously between $7 billion and $7.2 billion depending on the rate used — for three parks at Cergy-Pontoise, northwest of Paris, funded through Qiddiya Investment Company, a unit of the Public Investment Fund. Macron put the number at over 20,000 jobs. The project traces back to a December 2024 meeting in Riyadh where the two men found a shared enthusiasm for Dragon Ball.
Worth a note of caution on that second park: outlets are not uniform about how firmly the licence is attached. CNBC and Al Jazeera describe a Dragon Ball Z park flatly; Anime News Network hedged it as expected to be themed on Dragon Ball. Nobody has published a rights agreement for the French site. Treat the theme as reported intent rather than a signed deal.
What a silhouette leaves out
Shenron on the page is a line. Toriyama drew him as a ribbon that thickens and thins to suit the panel he happens to be filling — longer when the composition needs length, coiled when it needs mass, and never twice with the same proportions. There is no model sheet in there because he never needed one. A dragon that appears for three pages and grants a wish can be whatever shape the page wants.
Give that thing seventy metres and a structural engineer and the questions arrive immediately. How thick is he at the shoulder relative to the hip. What does a cross-section through the torso look like. Where do the load paths go when a train is running around the outside of him at speed. Does the spine ridge sit proud enough to cast a shadow at noon, and how is it fixed.
Every one of those is a decision somebody has to author from scratch, because the source material declined to make it. Character artists know this feeling from turnarounds that arrive with a front view, a three-quarter, and nothing else — you end up inventing the back of the head and hoping it matches what the designer had in mind. Here the invented parts are load-bearing.
Cel shading and the sun
The harder problem is the light.
Toriyama’s world is drawn in flat fills with hard-edged shadow shapes. That look is the deliberate removal of everything real light does: no soft terminator, no bounce, no gradient across a curved surface. Cel shading is subtraction.
In 3D we spend real effort putting that subtraction back. Vertex normals get edited so a face reads as a single tone instead of a sphere. Shadow shapes get hand-authored into masks rather than computed. Arc System Works famously sculpts geometry to be wrong from every angle except the camera’s. All of it is machinery for defeating a renderer that would otherwise do the physically correct thing.
None of that machinery exists outdoors. You cannot edit the normals of a building. Put a Capsule Corporation dome in the Saudi sun and the sun will give it a smooth terminator, a warm bounce off the paving, and a soft ambient occlusion in the joints — a beautifully lit dome that has stopped looking like Toriyama drew it.
Paint and sightlines
Themed entertainment has two tools for this, and both are old.
The first is paint. If the light will not give you a hard shadow edge, you airbrush one on: shading, ambient occlusion and rim light applied directly to the surface as pigment, so the object carries its own drawn illumination wherever it stands. It works. It also fights the real sun all day — a painted shadow on the west side is simply wrong every afternoon.
The second is control of where the guest can stand. Forced perspective on Main Street is the famous version, but the general principle is broader: if a form only reads correctly from one arc of viewing angles, you build the paths so that arc is the only one available. Planting, walls, queue routing and the placement of the next photogenic thing all do this work.
Which puts a lot of weight on two things nobody photographs:
- the paving layout, because it decides the angles
- the maintenance schedule for the paint, because a repaint that drifts half a tone is a character who no longer looks like himself
Then there is the sky over Cergy-Pontoise
Assume the French park really does get the licence. It will inherit design language developed for a site in central Saudi Arabia — hard sun, high contrast, a sky that is a single flat blue for most of the year. That is close to generous, for this style. Hard light produces hard shadow edges on its own.
Cergy-Pontoise gets overcast. Overcast light is a giant softbox: it removes shadow edges entirely, flattens the form, and drops contrast across the whole scene. Under that sky a shape tuned for a hard key reads as a grey lump, and painted-on shading becomes the only shading present — which can look superb, or can look like a shed with a face drawn on it, depending entirely on how the paint was authored.
The two parks need different answers. Whether anyone has budgeted for that yet is not something a press conference tells you.
Qiddiya City park figures from Qiddiya Investment Company’s own media centre and the official Dragon Ball site. French announcement figures as reported on 24–25 August 2026 by France 24, CNBC, Euronews and The Japan Times; currency conversions differ between them and are quoted here as published.