skygiants

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.