Review of Dororo

Hi! Please note, that I do not consider myself a serious critic and I just wrote this for fun and to reflect on this show a little bit more :). *Spoilers ahead* Dororo has an outstanding concept - the story encourages the viewer to reflect on different questions connected to humans' morality. Is it always good to be driven and motivated for achieving your goal? What if you have to do many questionable things in order to achieve it? Is it fair to sacrifice one person's happiness in order to make a lot of people content? This anime tries to answer those and many other questions byshowing us the hardships, through which the main character has to go in order to get his body back.

Story - 10/10.
The concept of Dororo is very appealing and interesting to me. The story is about Hyakkimaru - his father sacrificed Hyakkimaru's body to 12 demons in order to be more powerful. After that the newborn boy was supposed to be drowned but he miraculously survived and after growinp up decided to restore his body. To do that he has to fight demons, who took his body parts - and that is the point in which the story begins. The title character - Dororo - is an orphan, who joins Hyakkimaru on his mission. Watching Hyakkimru getting his body back was very satisfing and I was cheering him on to the end. It was a little bit like watching Ash catching Pokemons - Hyakkimaru had to "catch them all" (get all of his body parts back) and I as a viewer was extremly invested in what part of his body will he get back next and how will he react to hearing, speaking etc. and the emotions connected to beeing able to use his senses and body. Nearly every demon or person, whom Hyakkimaru and Dororo met during their journey, had it's own story and to be honest those subplots were quite memorable and interesting as well.

Art - 7/10.
The characters and fights are (mostly - sometimes you can spot some characters making weird faces) very well animated, locations are pretty. My only problem when it comes to the animation were backgrounds. There just was not much happening around the characters...

Sound - 7/10.
The openings were alright, the endings were pretty nice too. Generally the music was good, nothing too catchy, but not bad either.

Characters - 9/10.
I liked both main characters and I consider them a good duo. Hyakkimaru was very motivated, strong and unsociable (well it is 100% due to him not beeing able to speak, hear or see, he just was not able to communicate with others). On the contrary, Dororo (at least at the beginning) had not got any major goals and just kind of sticked to Hyakkimaru in order to help him, was very sociable and a comic relief of the show. I grow attached to both of them, even though Dororo was sometimes really annoying... but at the same time it correspondend with his character. Hyakkimaru's mother and brother were both very good characters as well - both devoted to their duties as members of lord's family, met some difficulties in order to be able to understand and connect with Hyakkimaru. There was also Biwamaru - a blind swordsman whom Hyakkimaru and Dororo met a few times on various occasions. He always helped main characters and was someone like a teacher figure to them. Honestly I do not have much to say about the main villain - Hyakkimaru's father. Background characters were really good and I found them and theirs stories interesting and memorable.

Enjoyment - 8/10.
I enjoyed Dororo. The climate was great, the characters were lovable and the story was amazing. The ending was very good but I strive to know more about what happened later. I would like to watch 1 or 2 more episodes or even a few minutes, showing what happend to Dororo, Hyakkimaru and their land/prefecture after the events, which were shown in the anime.

Overall - 9/10.
I was really conflicted about my overall rating... I wanted to give Dororo an 8 but it just did not feel good. As I have already written I think that Dororo's concept is outstanding, but at the same time I think that it could be executed better.

What was I (a little) disappointed about:
- nothing
- the backgrounds could have been better.
- the ending? It was a bitter-sweet ending and I liked it but I did not feel fully satisfied. The story feels closed but I still want to see more.

Thank you for reading and have a great day :)!