Dororo (2007)

Director Akihiko Shiota’s vision of Ozamu Tezuka’s manga Dororo is a fun, popcorn movie.


The story follows a child whose father made a deal with 48 demons. The father is granted the power to rule the world in exchange for his son to be divided amongst the demons. Each demon gets a body part and what is left is born. Like Moses, the baby is put into a basket and set adrift. An old man finds the child and raises him as his own. He crafts the missing body parts out of clay making the kid a Golem from Jewish myth.


As luck would have it the old man comes upon a sword that can destroy demons and forms the child’s hand around it. To use it, he has to pull his hand off, which is quite comical. The boy is hunting down the demons that have laid claim to his body parts. As he kills them with his sword the body part is restored to him.

The story could have been super serious and scary, but Shiota decided to play it for cheese. This might be due to the lower budget computer graphics would play better with the cheese. It works and is quite a fun movie.

At its heart it is a super violent family movie. My 9 year old watched it with me and although initially skeptical about the subtitles, she enjoyed the movie quite a bit. She even noted at the end that not all 48 demons were dead yet and if we could watch the second one. The second and third movies are being filmed simultaneously for a future release date.

I would recommend this movie to Japanophiles, martial arts movie fans, anime/manga fans, and scifi/fantasy fans. Kids will like it but it is pretty violent although not very realistic. Wives/girlfriends probably won’t care much for it unless the fall into one of the fore mentioned groups.