Q Hayashida's artwork in the manga can best be described as gritty, post-apocalyptic punk art that would look perfect on the back of a skateboard. Translating her incredibly unique style into moving imagery likely posed a Herculean task for any prospective animation studio, which is probably why Studio MAPPA settled on CGI—typically a major turn-off for anime fans.
Q Hayashida
CGI is surprisingly effective for Dorohedoro, though. With CGI, MAPPA manages to translate the world of Dorohedoro to the screen in a manner that maintains both Q Hayashida's wild level of background detail and perpetual sense of surrealness.
But before we go further, what is Dorohedoro even about? Well, loosely, it's about an amnesiac man named Caiman whose head has been turned into that of a lizard by a sorcerer from another dimension. This leads Caiman on a hunt to seek out and kill every sorcerer he can find in pursuit of answers to his predicament.
While the premise of Dorohedoro is certainly bizarre, writing it out doesn't do it justice. This is a series that thrives on execution.
In a larger sense, Dorohedoro is about two worlds—the sorcerer's world, where most people are born with the innate ability to perform magic through smoke in their bodies, and Hole, the slum world where said sorcerers go to practice on living subjects. The inhabitants of these two worlds oftentimes find themselves at odds with one another, but Dorohedoro perfects a tightrope act of moral greyness.
Can the antagonistic En Family—a mafia-like organization of sorcerers led by a man who can turn anyone or anything into mushrooms—really be so evil when all of its members are so likeable and care about one another so deeply? And can Caiman really be the hero when, in the very first episode, he rips a child sorcerer's face off? Oh, yeah, Dorohedoro is intensely gorey, full of body horror and limb dismemberment.
But let's not forget the other glaring element of Dorohedoro's unique brand of weirdness: It's intentionally hilarious.
Genre-wise, Dorohedoro would most easily be categorized as a mash-up of dark fantasy, action, and adventure, but a lot of the time it also feels like a comedy.
Netflix
For instance, in one mid-season episode, the Hole doctors who specialize in helping victims of sorcerer magic play an intramural baseball game against the Hole doctors who specialize in non-magic-afflicted victims. The game comes complete with a wonderfully silly shark mascot dance, a baseball player who also happens to be a giant, experimented-on cockroach, and the baseball-related death of an unfortunate doctor. Again, writing all of this out doesn't do it justice.
Right off the bat (GET IT?), the very existence of a baseball episode in the middle of a hyper-gorey action-adventure series is ridiculous. But the episode is extra-impressive when the world-building elements are taken into consideration. Despite the Hole being painted as an oppressive, brutal slum, it's also just the regular, everyday world for the people who live in it, so it makes a surprising amount of sense that when its inhabitants aren't busy being murdered or tortured, they might also enjoy the occasional baseball game.
The truly amazing thing about Dorohedoro is how unexpected every episode feels. Unlike literally every other serialized show I've ever seen (and I've seen many), there was never an episode of Dorohedoro that didn't feel surprising. More importantly though, every weird twist, no matter how outlandish, feels wholly deserved and thoroughly grounded in the show's fantastical world.
Dorohedoro is most certainly not a show for everyone. It's probably not for the squeamish or faint-of-heart, and it's definitely not for anyone who doesn't like protagonists with lizard heads. But if you like stories with compelling characters, high-level world-building, well-done humor, and hideous violence, you owe it to yourself to give Dorohedoro a shot. Oh, and make sure to watch the Japanese version with subtitles. You can thank me later.
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