How Tall is Krillin?

Once upon a time, long ago in Dragon Ball, Goku and Krillin were almost the same height! I know, shocking! But yes, for most of the original Dragon Ball series, they were a similar height, but Goku grew like a normal adult, and Krillin seemed to just stop growing as a teenager. And the interesting thing about Krillin is that he seemed to actively be shrinking between DBZ and DBS, so just how tall is Krillin?

Krillin is officially 5ft / 152cm tall in Dragon Ball Z, according to official sources, but in Dragon Ball Super, he is closer to 4ft 4in / 132cm.

Krillin’s official height is 5ft.

According to the Daizenshuu 7: Dragon Ball Encyclopedia, which is considered any official canon source of information, Krillin is just 5ft. This was produced at the end of Dragon Ball Z, so we know that Krillin’s height for the majority of Dragon Ball Z is 5ft.

How tall is Krillin in Dragon Ball Super

Krillin appears to have shrunk from Dragon Ball Z to Dragon Ball Super. Based on semi canonical promotional artwork, we can see a huge difference in height between Krillin and Android 18.

From studying this image, it looks as though Krillin is just 4ft 4in / 132cm, which means Krillin has shrunk 8 inches between DBZ and DBS. No explanation is given for this shrinkage, and no reason is given by the creators for such a big difference in height.

How tall was Krillin in the Original Dragon Ball

There are no official heights known for Krillin from Dragon Ball, but there is an interesting article detailing Kid Goku’s height in the original Dragon Ball series.

They estimate Kid Goku started off at around 3ft, so Kid Krillin was probably around 2ft 9 or 2ft 10. (These are not official numbers, they are guesswork)

Why is Krillin so short?

There’s no real explanation given as to why Krillin is so small. He is a human, just like Yamcha and Gohan, so he should have been capable of growing quite a bit more.

Some people are just short without any medical conditions, and they just lack as much Human Growth Hormone as the average person.

But from a character perspective, Krillin is often used as comic relief, so perhaps Toriyama wanted to make him comically short in Dragon Ball Z to add a bit more humour and levity to his character.

Why are heights so inconsistent in Dragon Ball?

Not just looking at Krillin, throughout Dragon Ball, in general, heights characters seem to change a lot, with notable characters being shrunk and enlarged on a whim being Krillin, Vegeta, King Cold and Ox-King.

Rather than looking at a hidden agenda for this, the explanation is probably that drawing is hard. Frames often depict characters and weird angels and spaced apart, that you’d need a team of mathematicians on hand to do the calculations to make sure everyone is a consistent height all the time.

Another explanation is that there have been different teams of different animators working on Dragon Ball over the years. So it’d be really unlikely that 100s of separate artists have a 100% consistent height for all the characters in every panel/frame. You’d imagine quality control should be able to spot extreme examples, but mistakes happen in all walks of life.

There’s a great post on the Kanzenshuu forum dating back to 2012 if you’d like to read more discussion on the topic.