Doraemon Movie 17: Nobita to Ginga Express

My overall take: An entertaining romp that culminates in a high-stakes encounter, though I find the conflict less interesting than the journey.

In this movie, Nobita and his friends take a trip on a train that traverses the Milky Way. This is a fun one, especially once it's revealed that the final stop of the Galaxy Super-express is an amusement park built on a cluster of planets, with each planet having its own theme. Watching the main characters go from planet to planet trying out the different facilities is quite entertaining.

Just about everyone gets a moment to shine in this story... except maybe poor Suneo, whose ... main role is getting body-snatched by an alien parasite. Additionally, Shizuka's primary contribution (discovering that the parasites are weak to soap solution) mostly seems like a cheap excuse to show her bathing onscreen. Gian's moment is actually very cool, however, and Nobita is the one who gets to finish off the main villain. It's a consistent trend in the Doraemon films that Nobita often comes across as more heroic than he usually does in the main series, but this may be the movie that shows off his precision shooting skills (one of the few things he excels at) the most.

That being said, I found the main conflict in this movie to be somewhat less engaging than the more lighthearted parts. For such a high-stakes narrative (including the first and probably only example in the Doraemon movies of a villainous party that wants to take over the entire galaxy), the way the plot unfolds feels surprisingly low-key. That is especially true considering the unusual nature of the villains here, being parasites that can take control of their hosts, which could have been used to build a suspenseful atmosphere in which both the protagonists and the audience were kept in the dark about who'd been possessed and who hadn't. Yet even though the parasite that takes over Suneo's body does trick the main characters by masquerading as him, that concept is otherwise not explored much, with the climax ultimately consisting of a fairly straightforward pursuit and a mostly one-sided battle sequence. Despite my minor gripes, however, this is certainly a distinctive Doraemon movie with its own unique charm.