Reigning wizards turn poor people into monsters and mushrooms … it’s anime Dorohedoro!
Dorohedoro is a science-fantasy anime TV series based on the Japanese author and illustrator Q Hayashida’s manga [comic or graphic novel]. The manga began serialization in late November 2000 and ended in late 2018.
MAPPA, a power center, known for works such as Yuri On Ice (2016), Kakegurui (2017-18) and last season of Attack on Titan (2021-22), produced the series. Dorohedoro was broadcast on Japanese television between January and March 2020. In May 2020, the series had a worldwide streaming release on Netflix, in 13 episodes.
Dorohedoro takes place partly in a post-apocalyptic industrial world, known as the hole, where people face the constant threat of being “practiced” by wizards. The bizarre story follows Nikaido, a female chef and owner of the Hungry Bug restaurant, and Caiman, a man who works as a medic who has lost his memory and has a lizard’s head due to the magic of an unknown wizard, in their quest to kill wizards and recover Caiman’s identity.
Meanwhile, En, a criminal lord whose organization, The Family, controls the wizarding world, sends his “purifiers”, Noi and Shin, to eliminate his enemies, the Cross Eyes. The ravages of Nikaido and Caiman and Caiman’s possible connection to the Cross Eyes inevitably lead to a clash. Many derivations and complications follow in the very elaborate series, with the season adapting about 40 of the manga’s 167 chapters.
MAPPA’s animation and direction involves remarkable experimentation and the use of newer techniques, such as mixing colored 3D models with 2D animation and detailed backgrounds, which embody Hayashida’s striking graphics with fluid animation, tempo and editing. (K) NoW_NAME’s soundtracks are suitably diverse, mixing varied genre influences and tones, balancing comic tracks with serious, smoky industrial ones. These elements provide crucial support for the adaptation, and bring out the strength of Hayashida’s work.
Anime and manga, especially modern entries, are notorious for their lack of interest in and connection with important social realities. They often favor risk-free and simplified (sometimes adolescent) humor, fictional world-building and / or excessive carnage to compensate for the absence of real artistic substance.
Anime is immensely popular and has a devoted fan base. In 2020 alone, almost 180 new and ongoing anime series were broadcast. It is prominent in the genre – such as The grave of the fireflies, Berserk, Akira, Full metal alchemist or Shiki– but most efforts remain imperceptible, restoring the same anodyne ideas and tropics that have been seen again and again in recent decades.
Dorohedoro manages to go beyond this, and stands out both stylistically and artistically. To a certain extent, it represents a serious and black humorous attempt to examine contemporary life, or aspects of it. While the apocalyptic setting draws heavily on 1980s anime and manga, DorohedoroThe focus on small shop owners and part-time medical staff at a local hospital is refreshing. The wizards’ influence on the hole, as they invade from their world, is terrible, and often resembles real wars and industrial disasters (and their “experiments” on humans evoke the Nazi experience).
“Trained” people often remain disfigured and disabled, or they die. The hole itself has been infected with the magic of the wizards, depicted as black smoke, shown in magical acid rain and fog that annually becomes thick enough to wake the dead like zombies, which the inhabitants then have to hunt and kill again. Culture is virtually non-existent, while simple pastimes take place under dramatically dilapidated circumstances, such as baseball diamonds dotted with bottomless sinkholes.
The series draws some inspiration from Lewis Carroll’s famous Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Caiman, plagued by the loss of his identity, brings to mind Carroll’s Alice in certain ways. In the same way, Nikaido resembles the white rabbit that Alice hunts. She briefly sports rabbit ears and practices magic that is said to manipulate time. Meanwhile, One, who turns everyone on the road to a mushroom, and the images involving the wizards’ smoke (the source of their powers), strongly suggest the pompous, hookah-smoking blue caterpillar Alice encounters.
The almost pristine architecture and absurd, often grotesque excesses in the wizarding world are equated with the violent, internal competition between wealthy teams and the ruling cliques. Hell and the demons that run it function as an oppressive government bureaucracy in the wizarding world.
En’s Family is apparently inspired by yakuza (the Japanese mafia, which has notoriously been embedded in Japanese political and economic life for decades). The social and historical amorphism, the weak side of Hayashida’s work, means that there is no concrete explanation for the family’s establishment and its relationship to the “government”. It simply arose by force.
Japanese increasingly thugging and militaristic developments in recent decades are indirectly reflected in Hayashida’s artistic work. The rehabilitation of the viciously authoritarian, anti-democratic past and traditions of the Japanese ruling elite is inevitably linked to renewed attacks on the working class and political opposition.
While the world of Dorohedoro undergoes change over time, the series creators ‘failure to account for the change often derails the series’ better intentions. As mentioned, One and his family come straight out of the carnage. Similarly, a short-lived anti-wizard murder group, which is said to have ruled Hole years earlier, fell for Shin’s magic. The series takes shortcuts this way, or just puts out the areas where there is no real light. Hayashida’s over-reliance on violence, which is often graphic and exaggerated, further reveals the same limitations in her view. In this connection, she takes the easy way out.
All too often, character relationships and interactions, often complex and naturally developed, and interesting details about the world in which they take place, are set aside for more insane violence. Shin and Noi’s competitive friendship – which has become a romance that flourishes over a long period of time, with entire chapters devoted to their story together, is often overshadowed by hit jobs and insignificant fight scenes. Darker comic scenes sometimes go off course with character deaths thrown out as light jokes, leaving the audience vague about how they should feel about the value of human life
One episode focuses briefly on Nikaido’s kidnapping of a desperate and confused young man who aims to collect enough residual smoke from the bodies of hospitalized wizard victims to become a wizard himself and escape a miserable life in Hole. After Caiman rescues Nikaido and kills the individual in self-defense, the former regrets the conditions in their society that have inflicted on young people. The events reflect in a striking way the real rise of mass violence, and mass stabbing in the case of Japan, in the midst of the crisis in the global profit system. However, the issues are only touched upon.
In 2019, after the completion of DorohedoroHayashida started a new fantasy sci-fi manga series, Dai Dark. With a vagabond protagonist constantly threatened with death, a space with disturbing creatures and a power-hungry cult akin to the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages that dominates everywhere, it seems that Hayashida’s new world again draws inspiration from a socially diverse and deadly reality of modern capitalism.
The difficulties and “gaps” in Hayashida’s work, including its overall “darkness”, are not just the result of personal weakness or social blindness. They reflect, at least in part, Japanese social realities, the paralysis of the working class fiercely oppressed by the unions and the official left. The resurgence of class struggle in Japan, as elsewhere, creates the opportunity for artists to be encouraged by the resistance and activity of the masses, and to find new sources of inspiration.
