So far this month we’ve tackled psychological horror, comedic horror, and horror-adjacent titles and episodes. However, as far as I can see, we haven’t yet looked at the niche-within-a-niche that is “grotesque-yet-humorous urban fantasy where people are turned into meat pies,” so I wanted to make sure we had that covered by featuring Dorohedoro.
I’ve mentioned a couple of series this month that are what I’d affectionately call “hard sells,” mostly because, for all their good points, they have aspects that are so objectionable to some audience members that to recommend them would mean knowing the exact tolerance level and content consideration of said audience members. Dorohedoro is another such series; though I’d argue that, on the whole, it’s honestly very good-natured and funny, it also features brutality and body horror of the type that unfortunately limits its potential audience.
The series takes place Hole, a megacity polluted by magical waste. The denizens of Hole are harassed (and worse) by sorcerers who use them as little more than guinea pigs. The central character, Caiman, is a man with the head of a lizard who suffers from amnesia related to how he was so transformed. His friend, a woman named Nikaido, runs a restaurant in Hole and has a mysterious past. Caiman and Nikaido fight back against sorcerer interlopers, though Caiman’s involvement multi-faceted in that he continues to search among their prey for the sorcerer who transformed him.
Over the various episodes we also meet several sorcerers, including En and his gang, who believe Caiman may have some connections to a rival crime group.
This show can be… a lot. There’s an episode where, during a sorcerer festival, it’s revealed that one of the characters has the ability to turn people into meat pies. There’s also a baseball episode (because of course there is). By all description the series is extremely gruesome, and yet ask anyone who’s a fan of it and they’re likely to emphasize how cute, funny, and charming most of the characters are. It manages a tonal dissonance that, in its strangeness, becomes an odd kind of harmony.
The anime series unfortunately seems to barely scratch the surface of the main storyline – 12 episodes is rarely enough to cover the material of a 20-something volume manga. What it manages to do quite successfully, however, is to convey the sort of gleeful, good-natured grotesquery that seems to define author Q. Hayashida’s work (if you find this series to your liking, you’ll probably also enjoy her new manga series Dai Dark). Perhaps someday we’ll see more of the series animated.
Dorohedoro is available to watch on Netflix.