Review of Dororo

Dororo is a flawed anime, one that ultimately fails to live up to its own expectations. If I had to summarize it into a single reason, it would be because it tries to do too much. It wants to be this edgy action anime with a philosophical bedrock and a gritty, bleak story. Ultimately, it does do each of these things, but rather than playing off one another they instead diminish each other, culminating in a grossly unsatisfying ending. I finally got around to finishing this anime the other day. I had started it as it was coming out, and just sort of fell offthe weekly watching train for the entire season and never got back to it. I was excited to binge this, as I'd remembered enjoying the first 8 episodes I had watched. Alas, little did I know that I had already watched the best part of the show.

Story:
The opening premise, of the boy with the body that was sacrificed to demons for his father's ambitions and the ragamuffin orphan who is his conduit to society, is awesome. And for the first half of the show, it works. We get the tried but true monster of the week format, with decent enough animation and bits of character development here and there. It was nothing special, nothing unseen before, but it was good. And then... it lost itself somewhere along the way. In the second half, the show becomes more and more focused on the moral consequences of Hyakkimaru's actions in reclaiming his body. This is a potentially interesting direction, but it never goes anywhere. Hyakkimaru is asked the same question, by different people over and over again and his answer never changes. It progresses nothing, and we kill another demon. And then, in a grand finale, the show ends, and our remaining characters move on with their lives. This plot feels more like a prologue as it finishes up. Its an origin story without anything to follow.

Art:
I have no serious complaints about the art. I liked the general style, it was an interesting more realistic take on the original Tezuka source material as far as I could tell. The animation itself ranged from pretty good to obvious cost-cutting. I can readily accept some of the latter if the former is good enough to cover it, and in this case for me, it just about was.

Sound:
The sound was fine overall, I didn't really notice it to be honest. The show gets bonus points from me here because OP1 is a straight-up banger.

Character:
The characters, alongside the plot, are one of the shows weaker points. Outside of our protag pairing, not a single one of the other slightly lesser characters gets any sort of decent conclusion to their storyline. This, for me, is where the show really loses itself in its attempts to do too much. There was so much potential to create really memorable characters out of a couple of minor personalities. The lord's Son, Tahomaru and the prosthetics doctor, in particular, are victims of this. Both had genuinely profound character moments at different points in the series along with fantastic backstories, and both go unutilized as they're in essence sacrificed to the plot. If these two had finished their arcs as characters, or at least continued them in some way rather than just being written out of the story, this show could have really been something special. They both had fairly memorable backstories fleshed out with philosophical notes that meshed well with Hyakkimaru's own moral journey. It's like the series was at odds with itself in what it wanted to do with these characters, and in the end, it does nothing. Dororo and Hyakkimaru's development over the course of the series was genuinely fun and does much to keep the show tolerable despite its other flaws.

Enjoyment:
It's hard to say if I really enjoyed this or not. I think overall I did as I was watching it, but the ending just left a sort of empty feeling. At the end of the day, it was just unfulfilling, and unfortunately, it impacted the joy I got out of the show. Its a shame, since I really did have high hopes for it. Some of it was enjoyable, but overall it just wasn't the whole package.

Dororo is a fine anime. It has moments where it wows and touches on the profound. It just doesn't do it with near enough consistency to properly portray itself the way it wants to. Its plot and characters clash rather than coexist, and in the end, its just too much of a mess to figure itself out.