Review of Dororo

Dororo had the potential to be truly great, but it wasted it. I wanted to believe Dororo had well-written characters and deep themes. But truthfully, it had neither. The visuals and directing were promising at first, but the animation quality rapidly declined and the fight choreography became lackluster. There was no substance to the story, it was rarely unpredictable, and the bulk of it was episodic filler. This show had potential with such a fantastic premise, but it squandered it by devolving into a formulaic monster-of-the-week structure. Dororo is the second adaptation from a manga originally released in the 1960s, and it was first adapted in1969. Tezuka Productions and MAPPA have collaborated to reboot the franchise with this new darker series; it is violent, gory, and it contains mature content. The premise goes as follows… In Sengoku-era Japan, a baby is born without skin, limbs, or internal organs, but the catch is his father sold all his body parts to demons and in return, they granted him power. And the dad of the year award goes to...! Not him. The demons who were given his body parts live throughout Japan, free to wreak havoc as they please. The deformed baby was set adrift on a river by order of his empathetic mother, and somehow he survived with the help of prosthetics. Later, this baby grows up to be a ronin, Hyakkimaru. It is his goal to retrieve what the demons stole from him by killing them all. At the start of his journey, he encounters the titular character Dororo; he's a mischievous kid with a name that means exactly what he is, a thief. Together they traverse Japan to kill demons and get back Hyakkimaru’s body parts. This is a fantastic plot setup loaded with potential. Imaging the possible routes the story could take inspired so much excitement in me, but unfortunately Dororo squandered its potential and went out with a whimper rather than a roar.

Throughout the vast majority of this overlong 24-episode series, the plot structure is mostly episodic. I expected Dororo to be an epic complete story of Hyakkimaru’s fight to get back what was stolen, in the end, it didn’t live up to its great premise. In the beginning, it was exciting, Hyakkimaru is a blind and deaf ronin with his limbs replaced by swords. He is determined to fight in spite of his defects, so finds a way. We don’t see the training right away, which makes him an enigmatic anti-hero. Right away, the show settles into an episodic structure, at first, the battles are thrilling; Hyakkimaru slices and dices through giant horrifying monsters with blood and gore flying everywhere. The fight choreography is incredible at first; visceral audio-visual feedback with each slash and stab makes combat tense and realistic, but as the show progresses it becomes far less impactful. Choreography weakens to just a simple slice drawn 2D across a monster design, smash cut to the next shot, and boom the demon is dead. By this early point in the show, it already feels like it is lifelessly going through the motions of the plot like a chore. Each monster used to be so incredibly important, he got back an organ or sometimes even a whole ass limb and it felt as banal as if Hyakkimaru was picking up lunch at a fast-food drive-through. No impact, just progression to the next scene leaving you feeling unsatisfied. It becomes a chore to watch, you just want him to kill the demon, get his body part, then move on to something more interesting.

There are some episodes here and there with good self-contained stories, like Dororo’s bloodstained backstory or Hyakkimaru’s training. These unexpectedly exciting episodes showcased the best art. The visuals CAN be solid, not spectacular, but well stylized and consistent. The gray-scaled flashbacks were somewhat obnoxious with red unnecessarily highlighted. There are less blatant ways of indicating a scene takes place in the past, just gray-scaling it is lazy. It’s like visual storytelling for babies, give me something worth analyzing. If only these episodes didn’t feel haphazardly thrown into the season, they would have been highpoints rather than slightly less average than the rest. Like any episodic plot structure, things somewhat go back to normal at the end of each episode, with the added limb onto the main character. Many episodes don’t feel connected to each other, which lessens the impact of the previous one. After binge-watching it I can say it is very disjointed, which might not seem obvious watching it weekly. It doesn’t flow naturally as a story should, we get a new monster each episode (with the occasional two-parter) and a development episode tossed into the mix at random. Dororo gets a flashback in late in the first cour, and it’s touching if predictable, but it feels forced. He randomly gets a fever at the start of the episode, then suddenly he’s telling us his life story in a fevered haze. This show is made for TV airing, to spark hype each week then be forgotten until it does something different in the next chapter. I don’t want to generalize here, but it seems like most anime produced by MAPPA have varying degrees of pacing issues and art inconsistencies. Dororo is no exception.

For the most part, the art is decent. Excessive zooming in and out on still images is constantly used in place of animation. The worst instance of this is a giant explosion being zoomed in and out on as an animator dragged it around their screen with a cursor. This happens during the most climactic moment in the entire show! These cost-cutting animation techniques undermine the impact of any scene they are in. The character art is cell-shaded, which is typically fine, but here it looks quite lazy. In other terms, the animation is very low effort. Cell shading isn’t a problem on its own but it doesn’t look right on the watercolor background art. I hesitate to call the background art “detailed” because it always looks are so messily drawn. Watching the characters walk across pudgy watercolor backgrounds looks off. It’s as if they were stickers pasted onto the screen rather than a part of the show. This further contributes to characters not being fully fleshed out into real and relatable people. For most of the show, the main perspective is given to Dororo instead. Once Hyakkimaru grows a personality he shares the protagonist role, then eventually his perspective overshadows Dororo—and mind you he has about one personality trait for much of the show. Dororo is developed enough to maintain interest in the first half of the show; he was orphaned at a young age and losing his beloved mother visibly impacted him. By the time Hyakkimaru takes the role as the main character, Dororo is sidelined and he becomes a damsel in distress to be saved in many of the side plots. When the show ends, it feels like he barely mattered to the story at all, other than giving us some emotional investment while Hyakkimaru was an aimless killing machine.

This is the fundamental issue with the two main characters, there isn't much to them. When one of them is developed, the other is unimportant. Dororo follows Hyakkimaru into fights out of habit and belonging, as we learn from his lonely back story. Hyakkimaru is silent because he cannot speak without his organs—which feels more like a plot convenience to avoid writing a character—but once he can speak he needs to learn how. His speech is simplistic, one word at first, sometimes his handicap is played to comedic effect; this is especially annoying in one tonally maligned comedy filler episode. There needed to be gradual character development along the way. But instead, it is episodic, things go back to the way they were. Hyakkimaru is already a capable fighter at the start of the show, and his determination to fight despite his lack of limbs made for exciting fights. As he gains more limbs the show loses what made it so original, it gradually becomes a cliched samurai story. Hyakkimaru’s struggle to fight even with defects becomes less of a struggle, he becomes a typical blank slate badass protagonist. Midway through the second cour is a major tonal whiplash. Rather than a continuation of the intense emotional action, the writers opt for an over the top comedic filler episode. It is a mediocre episode in its own right, with no action whatsoever with a lame monster of the week. What really gets me is how badly the episode was placed in the series. In truth, it doesn’t fit anywhere in a show that takes itself this seriously. Many of the episodes could have been removed entirely to reach the final confrontation faster. Once we do get to the ending it is worthwhile, but by then the damage has been done. Hyakkimaru's characteristic development leaps by the final arc to justify the duality between him and the antagonist. It works at setting up a decent finale that ultimately felt like an undeserved finale.

Throughout Dororo's twenty-four episodes, one thought was almost always on my mind, "This would be great if..."
If it was shortened to twelve episodes, then the writing would be condensed with more time to develop the side characters.
If they removed the filler and focused more on developing Hyakkimaru.
If they gave Dororo more purpose in the show.
If they connected all the random one-off stories with a theme.
If it were shorter, then maybe the art quality would have been more consistent.

In the end, I can't say I disliked watching all of Dororo. There were parts I liked, parts I hated, and the rest of the show was average. The most enjoyment I got from this anime was imagining how great it could have been. It is not worth anger, analysis, or remembering, and consequently, I have no reason to watch it ever again.