Dororo, a young orphan thief, meets Hyakkimaru, a powerful ronin. Hyakkimaru's father, a greedy feudal lord, had made a pact with 12 demons, offering his yet-unborn son's body parts in exchange for great power. Thus, Hyakkimaru - who was born without arms, legs, eyes, ears, a nose or a mouth - was abandoned in a river as a baby. Rescued and raised by Dr. Honma, who equips him with artificial limbs and teaches him sword-fighting techniques, Hyakkimaru discovers that each time he slays a demon, a piece of his body is restored. Now, he roams the war-torn countryside in search of demons.

A samurai lord has bartered away his newborn son's organs to forty-eight demons in exchange for dominance on the battlefield. Yet, the abandoned infant survives thanks to a medicine man who equips him with primitive prosthetics - lethal ones with which the wronged son will use to hunt down the multitude of demons to reclaim his body one piece at a time, before confronting his father. On his journeys the young hero encounters an orphan who claims to be the greatest thief in Japan.
 
Like an unforgettable road movie, Dororo reaches deeper than its swashbuckling surface and offers a thoughtful allegory of becoming what one is, for nobody is born whole
 
(Source: Kodansha USA)

Hyakkimaru is a young man who lacks 48 body parts because they were taken from him by demons before birth, as payment by his father, Kagemitsu Daigo, to obtain his wish to take over the country. When the baby boy was born he was missing 48 parts of his body, and thus was abandoned&mdash;thrown into a river. Hyakkimaru has grown up and now has obtained fake body parts so he can eliminate the 48 demons that were made from his body, and to retrieve his missing parts. Along for the adventure is the boy thief, Dororo, with whom he becomes friends. 
(Source: Anime News Network)

During Japan’s tumultuous Sengoku period, one man sells his son to a pack of devils in exchange for the power to rule. Forty-eight devils take forty-eight pieces of young Hyakkimaru, and the boy is left for dead. But through the assistance of a sage and a series of inventive prosthetics, Hyakkimaru survives. Together with the young thief Dororo, the now-grown Hyakkimaru embarks upon a quest to slay all the demons and retrieve the stolen pieces of his body.
 
(Source: Seven Seas Entertainment)
 
A remake of the original Dororo work by Osamu Tezuka.

Before producing a TV series, a pilot film was made to let sponsors and television stations grasp the work's pervasive quality. This is the pilot film for "Dororo" in which the characters are closer to those of the original story compared to the characters in the TV series. The faces and personalities of the characters in the TV series are altered from time to time to gain popularity among its viewers. As a result, sometimes viewers really loved it, but at other times it didn't go over as well. The pilot for "Dororo" was made in color, but the TV series was monochrome due to a tighter budget. The story depicts a journey in which the boy thief named Dororo and a cursed man called Hyakkimaru destroy monsters. Hyakkimaru can be a complete "human" only after he destroys 48 devils. 
(Source: Official site)

Using Tezuka's characters, the very best artists were allowed to let loose and adapt his characters into short stories.


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