Creators: Osamu Tezuka, Satoshi Tsumabuki, Kou Shibasaki
Publisher: Vertical, Inc.
Age Rating: Older Teen
Genres: Action, Adventure, Supernatural
RRP: $8.95
Movie Review: Dororo
Reviewed by Park Cooper

Okay, now I’m going to review the movie based on the manga also known as Dororo. And there are going to be some spoilers in here, not SO much for the movie, but for reading Dororo the series. So if you don’t want a surprise in the manga ruined for you, don’t read this review of the movie, okay? But just as a non-spoilery preview: I liked it a lot. So go see the movie if you want... before or after you read Dororo the manga... but I’m about to do a manga-spoiler here, though it won’t ruin the movie for you at all really. Okay?

Okay, let’s hope that that’s enough to make it so that spoilers don’t show up on MangaLife’s front page.

In the meantime, here’s the basics—I’m going to draw on the summary I just wrote for Dororo, the manga, volume 3, here: A warlord, losing badly these days, makes a monk let him into a sealed-up room with 48 statues of demons that another monk carved, which drove him mad. The warlord considers it a fitting place to dwell on his next move, because he’s extremely bummed-out about his bleak prospects for taking over the world. He offers the demons whatever they want in exchange for success in winning the war. The demons respond that they want the body of his unborn son. Okay, says the warlord, take it and split it up between you. And so a deal was made...

And so, once upon a time, a baby was born who was missing almost all of his parts. He had a mouth-hole, and a head, and a torso, and, like, skin covering everything, but that’s about it. How did he live nonetheless? That’s how you know the supernatural is involved, baby. They sent him in a basket down the river (y’know, like you do) and he was found (what are the odds? Insane. That’s how you know it’s FATE) by a guy who was the best prosthetic-parts maker in the world, who made him all his 48 parts, although of course they don’t work quite the same as real eyes and ears and so on. On the other hand, if you get poked with a sword in your fake leg, you don’t feel anything or bleed, if you get my drift. Little Hyakkimaru grew up to be a badass swordsman, and every time he kills one of the 48 demons scattered around Japan, one of the parts he’s missing grows in for real.

Now, in the MANGA, his sidekick is Dororo, a little kid who purports to be the world’s greatest thief (Since Dororo gets into trouble constantly, you can’t help but think that there must be someone SOMEWHERE who’s a better thief, but Dororo isn’t bad at the pure thieving, really).

In the MOVIE, a few things are done differently. In the manga (here’s the big spoiler!), Dororo, near the very end, is shown to be: a little girl! And you thought he was a smart-ass boy all this time! In the movie, though, well, they didn’t want to screw around with actual child actors, so they got a very cute, slightly-androgynous-considering-most-Japanese-actresses-are-insanely-hot actress to play Dororo, about 20 years old or so, acting more like a tough tomboy 15 year old. She does a great job!

The actor portraying the main character Hyakkimaru also does an excellent job, which is harder, since he’s sort of the badass samurai Helen Keller, having neither real eyes nor ears at first, and so he’s not really supposed to have a very wide range of body/facial/vocal expression from the start of the movie, having never EXACTLY seen or heard how people normally express themselves. Okay, acting like a stiff isn’t that hard, but loosening it up gradually as the movie proceeds is a pretty good acting challenge in my opinion. He is, of course, about as physically attractive as your average guy from a shoujo, too... I jokingly started calling him “Deppo Johnnymaru.”

So, yeah, the plot is good, the special effects are either very good or kind of rubber-suity... at one point there was an armless giant lizard one could swear was on Power Rangers... not that I watched Power Rangers... but somehow that added to the fun/riffed on the tradition of rubber monsters in Japanese films...

Barbara, my wife, did not like this movie quite as well as I did. I am giving it an A-. She would give it a B+. The reason for this is that sometimes, you do wish that the story would kind of get on with it and walk and talk a tiny bit less. It’s not a mixed-bag of pacing... it’s not inconsistently-paced... you just wish, in general, that we could get on with things and tighten it all up JUST a bit more. I would use the fast-forward-but-not-so-fast-that-I-couldn’t-still-read-the-subtitles button in short bursts sometimes.

Still. My jaw was just standing open at the beginning... the acting was good... the endgame was different and more exciting/suspenseful (and yet slower) than the confrontation, in the manga, with Hyakkimaru’s father and brother... I was glad we watched this, and Barb was too.

At the end of the movie, it says 24 DEMONS TO GO, which made us wonder if maybe they had a TV show spinoff in mind, which would be great because this would be PERFECT for a TV show, it would totally be Japan’s BUFFY. The whole episodic nature of the thing seemed to lend itself much more to that medium than to a movie, really. But... no. I did a little research online and read that it's planned to be a trilogy, with another movie coming nowish and another one sometime next year, so we'll see...

--P

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6 October 2009
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