DBViz: Matching Dragon Ball Anime and Manga Episodes
Visualizing anime pacing vs the original manga
An interactive chart matching all 444 episodes of the Dragon Ball anime (original series + Z) against 519 manga chapters to visualize the broadcast's pacing.
Automating Tedious Data Matching with an LLM
Matching episode summaries manually was so tedious that I shelved the idea for years. By leveraging the Gemini CLI, the entire pipeline—scraping data, analyzing summaries, mapping plot points, and writing the visualization UI—was handled almost autonomously.
Visualizing Behind-the-Scenes Production
The slope of the curve clearly reflects how the studio managed broadcast pacing over a long-running series:
- Filler Episodes: Plot lines clearly flatten out (represented in blue) during major transitions like the Saiyan and Namek arcs, where anime-original episodes were inserted to prevent the broadcast from catching up to the serialized manga.
- Pacing Swings: You can visibly trace the ebb and flow—slowing down to stretch thin chapter material, then accelerating once there was enough story buffer.