Should you happen to find a basket floating in the river containing a baby with no eyes, arms or legs, don’t freak out — it’s probably just Hyakkimaru! As created by manga master Osamu Tezuka (Black Jack, Astro Boy) in the late 1960s, Hyakkimaru is a samurai whose real flesh was stolen by 48 demons. With each one he kills via the blade that subs for a left arm, he gets back some of that skin and those limbs, one piece at a time, be it an ear or the liver. Don’t ask — just go with it.
Fully grown, Hyakkimaru (Satoshi Tsumabuki, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift) roams the countryside with wisecracking sisterly sidekick Dororo (Kô Shibaski, One Missed Call), looking for demons to slay. Among those they find include a spider-crab creature, girls who morph into oversized caterpillars, a woman who turns into some sort of witch butterfly, a living lotus tree with stretchy neck, something akin to those damned flying monkeys, a pair of talking monster dogs and one hopping devil on horseback. Our heroes gain an ally in a giant ghost baby.
Most of these beasts are all-CGI, but some come in the preferred form of dudes in rubber suits. Given the source material and the country that created kaiju cinema, I much prefer the latter. Regardless, the monster-slaying portions make Dororo quite a kick, but the more Hyakkimaru questions his origins, the more Akihiko Shiota’s epic slows considerably, eventually staying stuck in a 20- or 30-minute lag.
Even today, Tezuka’s Dororo enjoys a page-turning pace; this often-too-serious adaptation could have done that by ditching the dramatic introspection that wasn’t so heavy in the books and stick to the ghost-busting. It’s overlong at two hours and 19 minutes, and ends with no true ending, as Hyakkimaru has two dozen hellions left to stab. If a sequel gets made, I’d certainly like to see him do his thing, but I hope Shiota drops the music score that sounds like you’re being serenaded by a mariachi band in a Mexican restaurant while you’re trying to apply just the right amount of honey to that sopapilla. —Rod Lott