skygiants | (no subject)

Last year around Festivids time,

shati emailed me and

schiarire to ask if we would watch Dororo with her. Then she made this amazing vid, which you should all go watch, and also read Shati's notes, because she has already explained the most pertinent fact about this film: there is demon slaying to salsa style frolicking date montage music.

Nonetheless, in my own way, I feel the need to share Dororo with you all. IN GREAT DETAIL. BECAUSE IT'S AMAZING.

So Dororo begins with a man with a million arrows stuck in him making the brilliant life decision to bargain away all his firstborn child's body parts to a bunch of demons in exchange for immortality and world domination.

This means aforementioned child is born looking like this:

Fortunately, the abandoned eyeless, armless, legless, noseless fetus is found by a friendly passing mad scientist who thinks he's ADORABLE.

The proud new father makes his son a bunch of new body parts out of dead babies (it's okay, he doesn't murder them, just finds them!) and turns him into Edward Swordhands . . .

. . . not revealing until he is on his deathbed that his son, aka 'Dororo' (monster child) . . . is ADOPTED.

At this point a demon appears and explains to the now-orphaned child that if he wants to get his real body parts back instead of awkward dead baby prosthetics, he has to kill all 48 demons that stole them. So our hero sets out on a QUEST.

Pretty soon, he bumps into a PLUCKY THIEF . . .

. . . who decides to make friends with him at all costs, mostly by following him around and doing silly dances at him.

Then there is a hilarious exchange of names-or-lack-thereof, at the end of which the thief has decided that Dororo is a GREAT NICKNAME for a master thief, and decides to steal it. "I'M DORORO NOW. You can be Hyakki-maru."

Hyakki-maru, deeply unimpressed, indicates that now-Dororo can talk to the detachable hand.

Nonetheless, Dororo continues to tag along for a series of WACKY DEMON ADVENTURES.

Most of them end the same way.

Over the course of time and demon-fighting montages, Dororo and Hyakki-maru bond like the awkward dorks they are. Favorite moment: Hyakki-maru gets his real tongue back so he has an actual voice again instead of monster-child telepathy, and then they just kind of roll around in the mud shouting affectionately at each other.

For the record, Dororo ALSO has a tragic past.

When it turns out that Hyakki-maru's terrible bio-dad is also the person who killed Dororo's entire family, there is some trouble in paradise.

But eventually they make up . . .

. . . sort out Hyakki-maru's complicated bio-family and evil dad issues . . .

. . . and decide to keep adventuring adorably together!

Also, in case you were worried that after Dororo spends the length of the film as a boy, everything was going to revert to gender-normative romance at the end: NOPE.

Then Dororo knees Hyakki-maru lovingly in the balls and runs away.

AND THEY LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER.

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/349424.html

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

dimestore_romeo

I MUST WATCH THIS.

From:

skygiants

EVERYONE SHOULD WATCH IT

From:

inkstone

I was wondering why this sounded so familiar until I realized it's based on a manga by Osamu Tezuka! Which kind of explains the treatment of the genderbending, I guess.

From:

skygiants

IT IS, which I found out after watching and am now super curious about. Although my understanding is that there is no gender stuff in the original!

From:

inkstone

What? How interesting!

From:

skygiants

- oh wait maybe I'm wrong; Wikipedia indicates that there's, like, a reveal in the final chapter that Dororo (who has previously been depicted as a little boy) has grown up to be a "fine young woman."

I like the film ending better!

From:

terajk

HOW HAVE I NOT SEEN THIS????? /slain by the giant demon baby monster thing

From:

skygiants

IT'S THE CUTEST GIANT DEMON BABY MONSTER. They play ball with it!

From:

terajk

This just gets better and better.

From:

ceitfianna

I think I've heard of this and yes, must watch it.

From:

skygiants

Probably via Shati's amazing vid! :D

From:

shati

I was going to be like, there weren't THAT many fetuses, but I forgot about all the other fetuses. WHAT A GOOD ENDING.

From:

skygiants

I mean, I guess when you count it, there are only actually two fetuses. On the other hand, there are an exponentially larger number of dead babies, so . . .

From:

rushthatspeaks

OH YAY SOMEONE ELSE HAS SEEN THE BEST MOVIE!

Now watch the live-action Kitaro, it's just as good.

From:

skygiants

WAIT WHAT IS KITARO, tell me more!

From:

rushthatspeaks

It came out the same year as Dororo, and also falls into the category of 'confusingly great live-action adaptations of manga you would not expect to be made into live-action anything'. And they got licensed by the same U.S. company and put out at about the same time, so I watched them together and was surprised and delighted by both.

The Kitaro movie is a loose take on Shigeru Mizuki's classic GeGeGe no Kitaro (now vaguely available in English!), and what it mostly has are ALL THE YOUKAI AND SPIRITS EVER BEING AWESOME.

Like, this is a film in which there is LITERALLY A TALKING ANIMATE WALL. A live-action film. TALKING. WALL. Weird-ass folkloric creatures occasionally just wander randomly through the background. Kitaro's father, as is the case in the original manga, suffered A Terrible Accident some time ago, which destroyed all of his body except-- one eyeball! Which grew arms and legs and a mouthy attitude and now wanders around making Stern Fatherly Pronouncements and taking baths in cups of tea. LIVE. ACTION. MOVIE.

GeGeGe no Kitaro is a title of such cultural significance in Japan that there is literally an anime about the experiences of the mangaka's wife while he was drawing the original manga, so the movie had all the budget ever thrown at it. There are so many different anime versions of Kitaro that I have lost count, but the live-action film is my favorite and is a big silly grin of a confusing thing.

You know, like Dororo is.

From:

jinian

We rented both, because I am smart enough to listen to you. :)

From:

skygiants

one eyeball! Which grew arms and legs and a mouthy attitude and now wanders around making Stern Fatherly Pronouncements and taking baths in cups of tea

. . . . . I MUST SEE THIS MOVIE

From:

cyphomandra

Wow. I read (and really liked) the manga, but I have to admit that at no point did I think "someone would really make this into a live action movie!". I was obviously making entirely unjustified assumptions about the mass appeal of a baby missing 48 body parts.

The manga is pretty violent, often uncomfortably so, and Dororo gets beaten up a lot, often to get to Hyakki-maru - do they keep that?

I'd disagree with the Wikipedia summary about the ending - at the beginning of the last volume, the reader finds out Dororo is female-bodied (I certainly hadn't seen it coming), and then towards the end Hyakki-maru reveals that he knows and tries to leave Dororo behind from the final confrontation, telling him to "grow up to be a fine lady". Dororo is about as impressed by this as you can imagine, follows him, gets taken hostage by at least two separate groups of people, intervenes helpfully in the final confrontation and threatens to throw poop at Hyakkimaru if he calls him a girl againl. Hyakkimaru gives Dororo his sword, tells him to go support the peasants against tyranny and they'll meet up again when he has his body parts back.

From:

skygiants

I think this film CLEARLY has a wide mass-market appeal! Who doesn't want to watch a movie about a baby missing 48 body parts?

Dororo does not get beaten up to get to Hyakki-maru really at all! Like, Hyakki-maru does more of the fighting, Dororo does more of the flailing and getting comically blood-spattered, but overall most of the violence is of the terrible CGI variety directed towards demons. And Dororo is also pretty clearly competent, and does get a few scenes also of beating up other thieves and dropping rocks on monster's heads and so forth.

Wikipedia says: As a side note, Dororo is most often construed as a man, or young boy, often being called as such, but, in the final chapter, you see that he is in fact a she, after Hyakkimaru makes a comment one chapter before about how she will grow into a fine young woman. She does, when she is seen five years later. I like your description much better!

From:

cyphomandra

Huh. My version of the manga (Vertical, eng. trans) doesn't have anything happening five years later (there's a final page about the the hall of hell burning down fifty years later, but that's it). Weird.

Dororo is competent at fighting, especially sneakily, but unfortunately prone to starting fights with very large groups of people without a good exit strategy! The meeting with Hyakkimaru in the manga involves Dororo being beaten into the ground by half a dozen thugs sick of being stolen from - they are actually doing a rather good job of drowning him when Hyakkimaru intervenes.

I have now seen the light about the mass-market appeal of anatomically incomplete babies, although I am trying not to imagine the movie tie-in giveaways and collectible ranges of demonic body parts...

From:

skygiants

Hah! The meeting with Hyakki-maru in the film involves Dororo stealing a purse from someone, accidentally running away into the middle of one of Hyakki-maru's fight scenes (leading to the first "wacky copious blood spatter where Dororo happens to be standing" incident), getting info about Hyakki-maru from a friendly Exposition Monk, absent-mindedly beating up the offended owner of the purse, and then deciding to pursue Hyakki-maru into the wilderness because he seems interesting. Hyakki-maru doesn't really do much in any of this except kill a monster dramatically in front of Dororo.

NOW YOU, TOO CAN HAVE YOUR VERY OWN DEAD BABY ARM! :D

From:

jinian

WE JUST WATCHED THIS TONIGHT OMG IT WAS SO GREAT

From:

skygiants

HAHAHAHA SERIOUSLY JUST BY COINCIDENCE??? I mean I will take it! EVERYONE SHOULD WATCH IT

From:

jinian

It was steam engine time for artifical baby parts I guess! I read Kitaro at

rushthatspeaks' place last weekend, and we talked about that movie, and then the reviews were together so I rented both, and my boyfriend happened to feel more like gory samural weirdness than charming yokai weirdness.

DORORO!

(I feel like this has happened to me before with your posts, but I don't remember what. Mystical etheric connection for sharing amazing stuff!)