Dorohedoro

Dorohedoro is something of an ideal seasonal. Well-made, interesting entries into undersung genres tend to make the best seasonal anime short of actual capital-I Important shows, and Dorohedoro is indeed that. Trafficking in the same broad blood-n’-mud action-seinen aesthetic as things like the more serious No Guns Life, Dorohedoro puts a distinctly oddball twist on that genre.

The series is set in a fairly detailed constructed world--or rather, a pair of them. Our heroes, the lizard-headed Caiman and his BFF/possible-romantic-interest-but-we-haven’t-really-gotten-there-yet the blonde Nikaido, hail from the town of Hole, a city full of ordinary humans that just so happen to be preyed upon by the mysterious mask-wearing sorcerers who live in the next dimension over.

The show splits its time about evenly between these two settings, both are quite distinct, as much from each other as from general cliche.

The series’ plot is complex enough (and just plain weird enough) that summing up the plot beat by beat risks lapsing into dry recapping, but the generality of it is that our protagonists are split between the “Hole group” centered around Caiman and Nikaido, and a second “Sorcerer group” introduced a bit later on who live in the Sorcerers’ world. These characters are largely the henchmen of wizard/mob boss En, who has punk rocker hair and can turn anything he breathes on into mushrooms.

Over the series’ twelve episodes (which cover less than a quarter of the manga, which ran for nearly 20 years from 2000 to 2018), Caiman’s quest to figure out what sorcerer turned his head into that of a lizard’s and moreover, why, dovetails into larger intrigue that involves the En group, some of Nikaido’s own secrets, and dozens of other things.

Along the way we get to witness some of the better CGI to hit TV anime in recent years, not to mention some wonderfully gory action scenes that are guaranteed to make you wince at least once. The directing (courtesy of Yuuichirou Hayashi) keeps the whole thing tight, preventing it from getting lost in its own admittedly wide-ranging plot.

To say the series is a little gonzo feels like underselling it. The whole thing is delightfully out-there. Original mangaka Q Hayashida has a talent for this kind of thing, and it colors the entire work. This is actually something that helps the series keep from falling prey to the common problem of over self-seriousness in this kind of work. There’s a healthy dose of humor in here. Both classic slapstick and more bizarre running gags. My personal favorite being a roach-man named Johnson. He’s introduced early on as a monster-of-the-week, and is defeated, only to later return as a sort-of ally capable of saying the word “Shocking!” and nothing else. Dumb? Yes, but that’s not a bad thing here.

The other main thing that keeps Dorohedoro ticking is its character writing. You wouldn’t necessarily assume that something that stars a lizardman and is this hyper-violent would be particularly well-written, but the characters come alive through their motivations and backstories. There’s a hard-to-qualify “realness” to the characters that makes even the villains a joy to watch--something that’s quite easy to do wrong, especially in this genre.

If it seems like there’s not much else to say about Dorohedoro, that’s only because it’s so good in such a self-evident way. This is a series that is often content to speak for itself.