Doraemon Movie 23: Nobita to Robot Kingdom

My overall take: A compelling story with some strong emotional punches, but flubs a crucial character arc.

In this movie, Nobita and his friends rescue a lost robot boy, who comes from a planet where humans and robots once lived in harmony. It must be something about robots that brings out the emotional stories in Doraemon movies. That probably shouldn't be a surprise, because one of the most important themes of the franchise is, after all, the friendship between a robot and a human. The dramatic setup here is an interesting one for a Doraemon film, as we learn that the robot boy Poko was the ... childhood playmate of one of the major antagonists, the tyrannical Queen Jeanne, with both of them having grown up under the care of another robot, Maria. For most part, the movie gets a lot of mileage out of this premise, and the scene near the end where Doraemon and Maria deliver what they fully expect to be their last words to their respective charges is especially heartwrenching.

However, there is one way in which this movie drops the ball considerably on its emotional journey: the queen's character development happens far too quickly! Barely a montage passes before she has a change of heart. I wondered whether this was also the case in the manga adaptation of this story*, so I had a look.

*Although the original author of the Doraemon manga, Fujiko F. Fujio, passed away in 1996, his company Fujiko Pro continued to produce manga counterparts to the films for a while following his death.

As it turns out, it takes much more for Jeanne to come around in the manga, including getting smacked in the face by Shizuka! I have to say, I really wish this version of the story had been used in the film, not only because it would have improved Jeanne's character arc, but also because Shizuka doesn't get very much to do in the movie proper.

There are other elements of the manga that I would have liked to see in the movie, too. For example, Poko's ability to remotely pinpoint Maria's location seemingly comes out of nowhere close to the end of the film, but in the manga it is mentioned that he was unable to do so earlier in the story because he had a damaged antenna. The manga also indicates that the roboticist Dr. Chapek repaired Doraemon's Time Machine so that the protagonists could return home at the end of the story, whereas the movie never explains how the Time Machine was fixed.

Given that this is a relatively recent Doraemon film, I'm guessing that it's not high on the priority list for a remake. However, I think it would benefit a lot from one! Newer Doraemon movies are generally longer than those that came out prior to the 2005 anime reboot, which would give a hypothetical remake of Nobita in the Robot Kingdom more room to include the aforementioned items. Furthermore, the remakes often use material from the manga that was left out of the original films.