Dororo is a complicated work to parse from a disability studies perspective. The story is set somewhere in the early- to mid-fifteenth century, was written by “godfather of manga” Osamu Tezuka in the 1960s, has been told in multiple mediums in the ensuing decades, and was recently adapted into an anime for the second time in 2019. These disparate time periods have created a jumble of disability representation that ranges between accurate, inaccurate, and downright confounding.
Posts by Mitch Finzel
In REAL, Takehiko Inoue uses three similarly aged young men to portray different aspects of physical disability. By looking at these characters and their interplay, we can delve further into some of the ways REAL succeeds and fails at portraying disability.