Review of Dororo

This is not your typical fighting/shonen anime, although climaxing at fights, it prioritizes our protagonist Hyakkimaru and his internal development as he not only experiences many senses for the first time but sincerely begins to experience life itself for the first time, with our comedic relief Dororo as a guide. The truly blank slated Hyakkimaru creates a much more powerful impact than your typical naive protagonist. His confused first experiences with anger, sadness, fear, and pain are strong enough to melt even the most hardened of us before we're safely brought back by Dororo's playfulness. My main complaint of the show isn't even part of theactual show, rather every single opening and closing song(except the last closing). They're completely jarring and out of place next to the remainder of the soundtrack's careful, subtle tones. Each episode gently drifts you into 15th-century japan only to be tea bagged with the heavy j-pop engrish balls of "♪party's over but I'm still dancing.. ♪burn it up baby! sorry darling.. give me fiiiire!" aaand sometimes the backdrops to the characters look more like a painting than part of the scene, which although gorgeous in their own right makes them look more like they're performing a play instead in a living world.

Halfway through we have a tonal shift, and the true brilliance of this anime blooms with its absolute mastery of character depth. The once simple binaries of good and evil become a spectrum of gray. Even the evilest of people are understandable with human motives, yet there can be no victors without the defeated.

A rare gem in anime wherein the characters steal the show from the plot. Even I, a man of chronic hate boners couldn't bring myself to resent a single character or feel their motives lacked believability.