Osamu Tezuka's name is one that practically any manga fan should know. If currently anime and manga are among the most popular entertainment media, it is thanks to this man. If the name is not familiar to you, one of his best-known works is Astroboy (1952). The adaptation of it is known as the first anime broadcast in Japan, and its success was so great that it ended up reverberating around the world. Obviously highlighting each of his feats in the middle is something impossible for a single post, but the theme of this introduction is to remember one of his magnificent works: Dororo. It is a manga that was launched in 1967, and could have its adaptation in 1969, making it very popular in its time. After that time, Dororo has only released a video game for Playstation 2 in 2004 and a live-action movie in 2007. More than 50 years passed until the MAPPA studio presented us with a new anime adaptation by director Kazuhiro Furuhashi, who worked with Rurouni Kenshin and Hunter x Hunter.
The story places us in the Sengoku period, where Mr. Daigo decides to sacrifice his newborn son so that twelve demons give prosperity to his domain. This is why the child is born without limbs, without skin, eyes, nose, without anything. Only a head and a torso that ends up being thrown to its fate by a river. Luckily for him, a doctor finds him, and notices his desire to live and makes him a wooden prosthesis. After 16 years, the young man now named Hyakkimaru decides to use the skills he learned to hunt down demons and regain his body once and for all. As he begins his journey, he meets Dororo, a little orphan thief who will accompany him on his journey.
It is very likely that few people have noticed that this story has certain similarities with Astroboy, because both stories have as a protagonist a young man disowned by his family, and with artificial bodies, to be later adopted by a man who would become his father by teaching him moral values and would prepare him to face evil. Even so, it is an offense to call Dororo a "copy-paste", because his story is so well crafted, and it is quite a departure from what Astroboy is.
The entire journey of Dororo and Hyakkimaru is one of the many glimpses of a cruel time where death was something of the day to day. Both are orphans who prowl aimlessly fighting for their survival. The harshness of this plot is not based only on the violence experienced in these times, but also on the despair, sadness and constant struggle that those who were not part of royalty had to go through. The issue raised by this story is where we are willing to go in order to save and ensure our survival and that of our loved ones. During the 24 episodes that the series has, apart from hunting demons, our protagonists meet a large number of characters who, in any way, can represent the subject I am talking about and their own weaknesses. Obviously this does not mean that the script does not have his mistakes, of course he does, like any medium, has moments that, although they do not break from the story, do make us wonder if what is happening makes any sense. Even so, they are so few that they go unnoticed, and none of these harm everything that this anime tries to express.
Dororo is a series that knows how to develop his main duo, but also the rest of the characters. The evolution of Dororo and Hyakkimaru is very clear and natural during the course of history. The relationship between these two characters is one of the things that shines the most in this anime, because they are completely different individuals that complement each other, they depend on each other. They have good chemistry and it is even comical to see how Dororo tries to teach his partner to behave like a normal person. At the same time, it is very interesting how Hyakkimaru recovers every part of his body and what he considers to become a human, but he also loses that humanity by letting himself be carried away by his emotions. As for the other characters, they obviously do not have the same development as the protagonists, but if they do and they make the story very interesting, at no time does one feel that one contributes less than the other. To take an example, Tahomaru, Daigo's second son and Hyakkimaru's younger brother. This could be a stereotypical character, it could have been the spoiled prince who does not care about anything and just wants to reign, but in fact it was the opposite, they show us a young man who cares about his people and who trusts his comrades. When they reveal the existence of his older brother, Tahomaru agrees to kill him, but not because he hates him or something like that, it is because he knows that the existence of Hyakkimaru would negatively affect his town and the prosperity of this.
This brings me to another issue that I wanted to highlight, and that is the moral dilemma posed by the series. It can be said that Dororo poses "the tram dilemma", that is, it is the one where a person sees how a train is going to kill 5 people, and he only has the option of diverting the track to where one person is. And there is our question: are we willing to sacrifice one life to save five? Is it okay for Hyakkimaru to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of people in order to recover his body? The most obvious thing would be to say yes, but the series raises you so much the question that makes both the characters and the viewer doubt. The more we have watching the journey of our protagonists, the stronger the doubt grows as to whether what he is doing is correct, because little by little we see how the young samurai's thirst for blood grows greater. But, being a modified version of the dilemma, we have to take into account the context, and that Hyakkimaru's actions can be defended as a "divine justice", because beyond recovering his body, it would also change the actions of Mr. Daigo like that of all the lords of Japan. And this makes us later wonder: What is a human? What defines it? Is it based only on appearance or does this entail something more internal and spiritual?
Speaking of animation, the MAPPA studio left me satisfied in that sense. The series adapts and modernizes Tezuka's work. The battles on the other hand are very well elaborated too, they are fluid, detailed and bloody, everything you want to see in an anime set in this era. Although there are moments where the quality declines a lot and it shows a lot, especially in about two chapters in the second part of the series. Maybe it is not something relevant, it does not affect what Dororo is at all.
In short, Dororo is one of the anime that stood out the most in 2019, and I regret not having seen it before. It is a great tribute to Tezuka's work, and it shows how good it still looks with all the time that has passed, this story has aged very well, recommended.