Type: TV

Episodes: 24

Status: Finished Airing

Aired: Jan 7, 2019 to Jun 24, 2019

Premiered: Winter 2019

Broadcast: Mondays at 22:30 (JST)

Producers: Twin Engine

Licensors: Sentai Filmworks

Studios: Tezuka Productions, MAPPA

Source: Manga

Genres: Action, Adventure, Supernatural

Themes: Demons, Historical, Samurai

Demographic: Shounen

Duration: 24 min. per ep.

Rating: R - 17+ (violence & profanity)

Plot:The greedy samurai lord Daigo Kagemitsu's land is dying, and he would do anything for power, even renounce Buddha and make a pact with demons. His prayers are answered by 12 demons who grant him the power he desires by aiding his prefecture's growth, but at a price. When Kagemitsu's first son is born, the boy has no limbs, no nose, no eyes, no ears, nor even skin—yet still, he lives.

This child is disposed of in a river and forgotten. But as luck would have it, he is saved by a medicine man who provides him with prosthetics and weapons, allowing for him to survive and fend for himself. The boy lives and grows, and although he cannot see, hear, or feel anything, he must defeat the demons that took him as sacrifice. With the death of each one, he regains a part of himself that is rightfully his. For many years he wanders alone, until one day an orphan boy, Dororo, befriends him. The unlikely pair of castaways now fight for their survival and humanity in an unforgiving, demon-infested world.

User Review: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 in 1969. 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.

Download || Dororo Season 1 All Hindi Dubbed

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