Table of contents
- Interview Location: Anime Expo 2026
- Interview Format:In-person, Round-Robin
Manga Mavericks:What inspired the story of Dragon Striker?
Sylvain Dos Santos: When we started thinking about this, Charles and I were such fans of sports anime like Captain Tsubasa or Inazuma Eleven. Sometimes you have these crazy powers, but you never understand where those powers come from. Do the people in the bleachers see it, or is it just us, the audience? We wanted to create a mix of fantasy and sports where magic is at the center of the story and the universe.
When you see a dragon in Dragon Striker everyone can see it, everyone can feel it. When Skadi freezes someone on the field, they are really frozen. The idea for us, in the first episode you see magic before you see the first game. Everybody understands magic is all around the world. That was the first spark. And then we invented the “tama.” But the idea was to create an original sports show.
Charles Lefebvre: Let me just add to that, it was to make sure that magic exists outside of the field, and is at the center of the story, and how we built this universe. It was really important for us to understand they can use magic outside of the games. I think that will explain many things in the future.
Paul McKeown: In terms of the characters, we wanted to blend these things of the branded people in this really big world and try to bring the two things together. That was the intention. If we could hold the best of that we thought we could do something really special, and we did.
Manga Mavericks: Yes, you did.
Anime Herald: It is clear that a lot of effort went into the mustaches we see in the first episode. What was the impetus behind that?
Paul McKeown: Who doesn’t love a good mustache?
Charles Lefebvre: I have so much mustache, I am sorry.
Sylvain Dos Santos: Yeah, that’s more on Charles. Maybe for me it is frustration, because I cannot grow a mustache. It is physically impossible for me. Maybe it comes from that, I asked him to design mustaches.
Charles Lefebvre:(Laughs)I am sorry for that. I relate to mustaches so strongly because of my father. When he gave me a kiss, dad equals mustache.
Anime Herald: I understand. Mustache envy and familial mustache.
Unknown Outlet: How did you go about creating a series that appealed to fantasy fans as well as sports fans?
Charles Lefebvre: I think that was the biggest challenge. I love soccer, but I am not so much a fan of soccer. I watch the big matches at the major events, but I have to stay outside the room, because I feel like if I watch it, they are going to lose. I have a strange relationship with sports, because it makes me very emotional. That’s what I wanted to bring with Dragon Striker. This feeling that you are watching the match and the crowd is screaming, you feel it. I wanted to capture this energy.
For the mix of futbol and fantasy, fantasy has been my jam since childhood. It’s the type of world I really love. You can create everything from the ground up. You can make a world that has some similarities with yours, but with little differences. How the characters think and feel is going to be different based on how the world is built. It was really fun to play with that. We have a game that is quite violent. How it is for the crowd. I like to say it is like Gladiator with a ball. The world of Dragon Striker is a world where this type of violence is common. How to treat it is tied to the story.
Paul McKeown: I think that sports and fantasy are the two coolest things you could ever combine. I’m a huge soccer fan. There are so many great stories. If you’re watching the World Cup, you realize there’s a winner and a loser. You see players doing these amazing feats. There’s naturally great stories there. As massive fantasy nerds, it makes perfect sense to put these two things together. In the stories there is so much passion and drive. You get sucked in because the characters want to win. I think it’s a great combination.
Highlights from the Dragon Striker panel
On the biggest challenge:
Charles Lefebvre: The biggest challenge for me was to create the characters and keep them unique. We have plenty of characters in this show, with a little bit of screen time for some of them. We’d like to continue this adventure and tell a lot of different stories.
Sylvain Dos Santos: There are a lot of characters and locations. For me, the biggest challenge was to create this world and make it feel like it was there before and will be there after. When you design a chair, it has to work as a chair. The story is also dangerous, and we didn’t have so many episodes, so every episode was a challenge.
Paul McKeown: One of the biggest things we had to find was how to balance all of these elements and have it be coherent while driving the stories and saying all of these things we wanted to say. We have characters with deep arcs that we want to grow. We have these spectacular sports games. We want to have the world feel lived in. Building the story was a big challenge, while keeping it entertaining.
On creating characters that inspire fan created cosplay:
Sylvain Dos Santos: That’s the greatest gift.
Charles Lefebvre: That is what we are deeply waiting for.
It’s when the stories become real and go outside of the TV. We were wondering if we would see any cosplayers. We are making this story to please ourselves, but we also want to give this feeling of wonder we had when we were kids watching anime. Passing the torch to a new generation. I feel like it is now our time to tell a story. We hope it is like it was when I was watching as a kid. That’s what we want to give back. For me, the biggest prize is when a friend from junior high school sends me a message “my kid is completely into your show!” That’s the best. If we can add merch, that would be even better.
Sylvain Dos Santos: When we started to have fan fiction, it’s the best feeling. That’s what we did when we were young. It’s like Charles said, we are passing the torch. That’s beautiful. We are so happy.
Paul McKeown: Obviously we’re guys, but what I think we did was create a show with so many diverse characters that you could connect with. There’s someone for everyone. It’s there for people to take. That’s the hope. I shouldn’t say it, but I think we did a great job of representing so many different people and it’s there for people to find.
On telling the story and the number of seasons:
Charles Lefebvre: We have a lot of axes (plural of axis) we can play on. When we did episode four, there were questions like how can we maintain this level of intensity? It’s like a volcano, finally erupting. We can get everything we have out of our system. We can keep it interesting and entertaining with a lot of different players. We still have so much to discover of this world. We’ve only seen a little piece of it.
(Editor’s note: Dragon Striker has been renewed for a second season.)
On their respective favorite characters:
Sylvain Dos Santos: Milo (Stonegarden). I think he has the most interesting tama.
Charles Lefebvre: For me it is Ssyelle, because she’s good. There are a lot of things I like in her.
Paul McKeown: I feel like they are all our children, and I don’t think I can say I have a favorite child.
On balancing the sports and fantasy aspects:
Sylvain Dos Santos: Balancing them is a challenge. The magic, the epic fantasy, and the sports are intertwined. They are two sides of the same coin. Everything is linked. It’s not like we are trying to manage two different things. We are just trying to balance them.
Charles Lefebvre: We have to make sure we have good pacing and to keep the matches entertaining. We need to make sure we have contrasts. Slow moments, when we enjoy the background and the music. And some action packed moments. A match can be one episode, but it’s really packed. It’s not like Inazuma Eleven or Captain Tsubasa where a match can be five episodes. We can’t have that kind of pacing.
It’s the same kind of feeling that I had when watching Evangelion. We knew the fights were going to be short. That was the first time I saw something like that. It didn’t have to be a long fight likeDragon Ball Z. I love Dragon Ball Z, but the fights were long. In Evangelion they were short, but really intense. That’s what we wanted to do with our storyboards. Give them an intense full match in a short time.
On their influences:
Charles Lefebvre: We watched anime before we went to school. After that, I loved JRPGs. I played Secret of Mana and Chrono Trigger with my brother. That’s where I discovered different universes that explained their characters in depth. In high school I binged anime. That gave me my grammar and vocabulary for layouts. I love to nourish myself with a lot of different types of anime, from high art to low.
Sylvain Dos Santos: The anime that shaped me the most was Saint Seiya: Knights of the Zodiac. They were almost dead, but they kept fighting. That’s the stuff. The way Key uses his power was inspired by Fire Force. We never talked about it. I imagined how Key moves with firepower. I don’t think we talked about it, but he did it exactly the same. One of the beautiful parts of our collaboration is we never need to talk.
Charles Lefebvre:(Laughs)We talk a lot!
Sylvain Dos Santos: We talk, but we don’t need to. But yeah, we are huge TV fans, so you can find a lot of influences.
Paul McKeown: I always had a secret hope that Western broadcasters, like Disney, would do something anime-inspired. Because it makes perfect sense to me. The fact we had the opportunity to bring these two things together was a dream come true. I am glad Disney trusted us to do that because it was long overdue. It was a secret dream for me.
Charles Lefebvre: I remember when Key activated his tama and he was moving around, Disney said, “We have to talk about this sequence.” I was like “Shit, they are going to kill it.” When we had the meeting they said “You have to push it. You aren’t going far enough.” I was like, “Okay!”
That was one of the biggest surprises. That we could create this show inside of the house of The Mouse. The team was really passionate about it. So many members were consumers of Japanese animation.
On queer representation on a Disney show:
Sylvain Dos Santos: Diversity wasn’t a question for us. It’s how the show is. We never were concerned with this. It wasn’t a discussion at all.
Charles Lefebvre: We created a variety of characters with different backstories. We didn’t single out LGBT characters. They simply exist as characters in the show. They aren’t perfect. They have a lot of problems, like everyone else. That’s the thing. It wasn’t a question for me.
Paul McKeown: We wanted to make a show for everyone, so everyone had to be represented. That was it.
