Dorohedoro Review

Q Hayashida's manga is drawn in dense black hatching with a filthy, handmade texture, which is precisely the thing cel shaded three dimensional models are worst at. Yuichiro Hayashi's adaptation gets closer than it had any right to. The Hole is rendered as a genuine place: tiled walls streaked with blood, mushrooms growing out of corpses, laundry over an alley where somebody's head was removed an hour ago, and the camera moves through it in ways hand drawn work could not afford.

The models still stiffen in dialogue and faces lose the manga's grubbiness, so this is a compromise rather than a triumph. The cast is what carries it. Caiman is a cheerful idiot with a second mouth inside his head; Nikaido runs a restaurant and would commit any crime for him; and the sorcerer side, meant to be the villains, turn out to be a workplace comedy about En's gang eating together, with Shin and Noi as two enormous masked enforcers whose friendship is the warmest thing in the show.

The soundtrack by (K)NoW_NAME is a big part of the mood. The flaw is structural: twelve episodes cover a fraction of the manga, so nothing resolves, the central question of Caiman's identity is left hanging, and the series functions as an advertisement for reading the book. Enjoyable, distinctive, unfinished.