It's not going well for lord Daigo Kagemitsu (Kiichi Nakai) during one of the many Japanese civil wars - wounded and alone, he comes to a temple containing 48 demon statues. He is trying to convince the slumbering demons of a pact with him; turns out they are in fact willing to give him the power to conquer the world (which seems to mean Japan), if he promises each of them one body part of his soon to be born son.
Kagemitsu's a rather unpleasant man and agrees without much hesitation to the demons' proposal.
His son is born without much of a body, yet still he is alive. Daddy wants to kill his offspring, but his wife Yuri (Mieko Harada) convinces him to do the Moses thing and set the child adrift in a river.
As Destiny would have it, the baby is found by the only person able to help someone in his state, a magician/scientist who slowly starts to build a body out of the dead bodies of children (killed in the perpetual war waged by the little one's natural father) for his foster child. He also hides useful weaponry in the boy's - now called Hyakki-maru - extremities and trains him in the martial arts.
The boy (growing up to be played by Satoshi Tsumabuki's sole facial expression) has a destiny to fulfill - to search for the demons that stole his body parts and kill them. Each killed demon gives Hyakki-maru one part of his body back.
Years later, after the death of his foster-father, Hyakki-maru meets a young female-but-acting male (says the script, not me) thief (Kou Shibasaki). At first, she is out to steal one of his swords to help her fulfill her own vengeance (and just guess who her intended victim is), then she steals one of his names, Dororo, for herself, and soon she is becoming Hyakki-maru's only real friend and helps him out in the demon hunting business. Until some day the confrontation with Kagemitsu can no longer be avoided and concepts of vengeance and filial duty will just have to clash.
Dororo is based on an unfinished manga by "father of the manga" Osamu Tezuka and is keeping surprisingly well in Tezuka's spirit. As one should know, one of the master's typical stylistic strategies was a (not necessarily subtle) attack on his readers on as many fronts as possible at once. A typical day in the land of Tezuka starts with (sometimes maudlin, sometimes damned teary-eyed making) sentimentality, suddenly shifts into slapstick humor (with a weird tendency to actually be funny), only to spurt some very interesting bodily fluids a few moments later and then ends with some philosophical discussions of the nature of humanity. Dororo's director Akihiko Shiota tries very much the same with his film - not every single scene will work well for everyone, some might even find the film's tonal shifts grating, but I think it would be difficult to deny how emotionally touching and willing to engage with ideas the film often is. Some of the dramatic scenes are a little too much in keeping with the "oh the humanity!" style of melodrama, the film taking its themes (what it means to be human, friendship, the choices necessary to be human etc) sometimes more seriously than is good, but every melancholic stare soon makes way for some very broad humor and/or a rather clever character moment and/or some spurting gore from some demon or the other.
Ah, the demons! I have seldom seen a stranger mixture of rubber and the digital. I don't think anyone working on the effects for the film was interested in letting the monsters look realistic at all - every creature is as fake as possible, be it rubber fake-bird-guy or digital tree-with-a-head-woman, but the creatures are still beautiful in their singular design and in the sense of fun they and the fight scenes show. It's a very Japanese direction to go in, and one of which I highly approve.
The script also has some surprises. Especially the final fourth of the film does not work out as one would expect, neither in the way the vengeance plot line works out, nor in the thoughtful way the film handles its final meaning of what it means to be human. I was also quite happy that the film doesn't make lovers of its two protagonists when it would be the convenient and expected thing to do. Instead, it lets people be friends when they so choose.
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