Dororo and Inu-Oh are both inspired by Japanese heritage and historical settings.
Osamu Tezuka’s manga Dororo originally experienced a short, unlucky run on Weekly Shonen Sunday – canceled prematurely in 1968, the series still managed to live on, presumably thanks to the fame that its author reached by the end of his career. First adapted in 1969, the manga was picked up by MAPPA in 2019 for a 24-episode anime series that was mostly acclaimed as one of the best anime of the year – if not of the decade. Two years later, another film rose to success –with the critics, if perhaps not with the public – which had no apparent connection to Tezuka’s early work: Science SARU’s Inu-Oh.
If Tezuka’s Dororo had stayed in the sixties, only a select few might have noticed the striking similarities between the two stories; yet, the success of MAPPA’s Dororo brought its protagonists into the spotlight, making it virtually impossible for anime fans to ignore the resemblance between the series and Yuasa’s rock epic. Each story's plotpoints: blind biwa players, stories of brutal battles, and a deformed boy who gets his limbs back one by one against all odds, make it hard to believe that it is all coincidental. And while some parallels might derive from Yuasa’s admiration of Tezuka’s work, it’s Inu-Oh and Dororo’s shared core rooted in Japanese history and folklore that allows for such similarities to stand out.
Dororo and Inu-Oh Share An Unconventional Deuteragonist – And Much More
Dororo’s story starts with a curse. Desperate for his land to prosper, a daimyo makes a pact with demons offering them his firstborn son. Hyakkimaru is brought to life with no limbs or skin, but still miraculously alive. Throughout the anime, Hyakkimaru and orphan thief Dororo, will fight to get his body back, piece by piece. Their path often crosses that of an old blind biwa player, who saves their lives more than once and is instrumental in both the story’s resolution and Hyakkimaru’s character growth.
Inu-Oh suffers a remarkably similar fate. Born deformed and shunned because of a curse unleashed by his father, he forms an unexpected friendship with blind biwa player Tomona and the two go on to become ante-litteram rockstars. The more Inu-Oh sings and dances, the more he regains of his body. The pair tell true stories of the perished Heike clan, who lost to the Genji (or Minamoto) in the 12th century and was forever sung in the Heike Monogatari.
Much like Hyakkimaru, Inu-Oh fights against a curse for which he is blameless and that was selfishly imposed by an unloving father. What’s more, he regains his limbs one by one until he is finally whole at the end of the story. While Inu-Oh’s inseparable companion is blind biwa player Tomoma, a blind biwa player also follows Hyakkimaru’s journey, providing assistance and moral guidance. Though Inu-Oh is set in a time before Dororo, both deal with the devastating effects of the wars that lacerated Japan for centuries.
Why Are Inu-Oh and Dororo So Similar?
In an interview with Deadline, when asked about Inu-Oh’s character design, director Masaaki Yuasa says that, while inspired by Japanese fairytales, Inu-Oh’s character certainly draws from Osamu Tezuka’s Hyakkimaru. While he tries to emphasize how different the two are in motivations and spirit, one can't help but wonder whether the author of the novel that inspired the film, Tales of the Heike: Inu-Oh, may have been equally fascinated by Tezuka’s work. An expert of the Heike Monogatari, writer Hideo Furukawa was struck by the idea of Inu-Oh when he read his name in Zeami’s Fushikaden, the classic Noh text, and decided to give him a new life. He doesn’t mention Osamu Tezuka.
If it is true, like Yuasa asserts, that characters regaining their bodies after banishing a curse are popular in Japanese folklore, Inu-Oh and Hyakkimaru might not be so much related to each other as heirs to a shared cultural legacy. Likewise, biwa players are a staple of historical fiction, since they are typically blind and appear throughout history as storytellers – especially in relation to the Heike Monogatari. The wars raging in the background of both stories stem from the overlapping of the Sengoku and Muromachi eras, in which Dororo and Inu-Oh are respectively set.
Despite Their Similarities, Dororo and Inu-Oh Tell Vastly Different Stories
In spite of its violence and sparse, startling dark moments, Dororo is still intrinsically an adventure anime series, with typical fights, comedy moments and multiple side stories. While halfway through the monster-of-the-week trope slows down the driving force of its central plot, however, the series still manages to bring its character arcs to completion and existential questions to the forefront. As the ending approaches, both Hyakkimaru and Dororo struggle to come to terms with what it means to be human, concluding that perhaps the constant, unrelenting tension between good and evil is really what humans are all about. After all, that’s what Hyakkimaru has been battling with throughout his life – and that’s what the viewer is left to ponder at the end of the show.
Inu-Oh, along a similar journey, has a wholly different story to tell. According to Yuasa, his joy for singing and dancing is what ensures he recovers his body; what is certain is that art is key to Inu-Oh’s transformation. Nevertheless, it’s the story’s conclusion that truly highlights the movie’s central theme: refusing to bow to the powers-that-be, Tomona dies to preserve his artistic integrity. On the other hand, Inu-Oh folds, renouncing his truth to be saved. While Tomona and Inu-Oh reunite centuries later, the question whether art should yield to authority stays.
On one hand, an unexpectedly dark and existential but generally heartwarming and adventurous anime series. On the other, a rock epic about the marginalized minorities and the voiceless, about art and power, and finally about the power of friendship. Dororo and Inu-Oh might share a deuteragonist and a common cultural heritage, but the distance between them is much more noticeable and makes these outstanding works of animation independently enjoyable for widely different reasons.