This Week in Anime

Stand By Me Doraemon and 80 Years of Gadgets

Jean-Karlo
Steve, the wise men of Styx may have said once that machines dehumanize, but if you ask me I'm fine with this trans-humanist stuff. I mean, if it weren't fun to think of the kind of gadgets we could get in the future, we'd never get Jean Reno or Bruce Willis doing Japanese commercials in intentionally-bad cosplay!

Heck yeah, I'd take a bullet for you, earless blue cat from the future!

Being Latino means you get to see a lot of beloved anime shows be treated with utter bewilderment when their discussed in the U.S., like with Saint Seiya or Captain Tsubasa. Doraemon is listed among them, sadly, but make no mistake Doraemon is very big elsewhere. So much so that in 2008, Japan's Ministry of Affairs appointed Doraemon—the fictional character—as the first Anime Cultural Ambassador. Ever since his debut in 1970, Doraemon has been a fixture in Japanese sequential art and televised animation in ways that many shows in America could only dream of—and yet, the poor robot cat has never been able to get his pudgy feet through the door. Even Disney airing dubbed episodes of the recent Doraemon anime couldn't bring him into the big time.

Or Keifer Sutherland, or projectile vomiting at a pie-eating contest. But you take what you can get. These two movies are part of a package deal, done to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Fujiko F Fujio, one of the two co-creators of Doraemon. As such, you don't need prior experience with the franchise to grok its deal—and even then, Doraemon is so formulaic that you wouldn't need to. To say nothing of there being so much Doraemon that you couldn't possibly watch it all. Seriously, the 1979 anime went on for almost 1500 episodes, not counting movies...

At any rate, the story is like this: Nobita Nobi is a fourth-grade loser. He has horrible grades, no real skills in anything, is a major dweeb, and absolutely no hope of ever getting better. He's basically Japanese Doug Funnie, complete with an incurable case of learned helplessness.

Oh god, the two of them are even blue...

Anyway, Nobita meets his descendant four generations removed. It turns out his life doesn't get much better at all: failing grade school means it's impossible to catch up when it comes to high school, let alone college. Because he has no skills, no place will hire him, leaving him to start his own company which burns down in a fire. Also, he winds up marrying his bully's little sister, having way too many kids, and lives the rest of his life surrounded by people he hates and being hounded by loan sharks. His descendent feels so bad he sends the futuristic robot cat Doraemon to stay behind and help him improve his life in the hopes that his family line won't be cursed for generations to come.

Even Doraemon hates Nobita so much he doesn't want to stick around, but Nobita's descendant basically programs him so that he's incapable of returning to the future unless he helps Nobita become happy in the present. Doraemon takes it about as well as you could expect anyone to.

This is where Doraemon's claim to fame comes in. See, Doraemon has a fourth-dimensional pocket on his front from which he can pull a seemingly infinite number of futuristic gadgets to try and help Nobita's every need. Many of these are quite famous in Japanese pop culture, too: there's the Takecopter (a little rotor you wear on your head that lets you fly around), the Anywhere Door (it lets you go absolutely anywhere you want just by walking through), and countless others that have been introduced in the past 80 years. None are quite so iconic as the time machine stashed in Nobita's desk drawer. I remember ages ago when Viz published the Faust anthology in the U.S. and one of the stories, Otsu-ichi and Takeshi Obata's "F-sensei's Pocket", details a pair of high school girls that find Doraemon's pocket and get into dramatic shenanigans with his gadgets.

Much of Nobita's concerns involve him impressing Shizuka, a classmate he fancies. But because he's otherwise such a loser, Nobita doesn't stand a chance. Invariably, he goes to Doraemon for some kind of gadget to help him out, which only serves to make things worse. Nobita is forced to learn a hard lesson about doing things the right and proper way—which fails because he has the cerebral activity of a sea cucumber. To wit: that giant egg is supposed to cause anyone inside it to imprint upon the first person they see. It not only fails, it backfires for Nobita: Shizuka imprints upon his better-looking classmate, comes to like said classmate even more when he points out he wouldn't use gadgets to impress people, and Nobita has to deal with his bully Gian being obsessed with his other bully Suneo.

I still don't get how Suneo goes from pointy hair to brillo-pad hair. I could barely recognize him when he showed up in the future.

This leads to one of the more dramatic moments in the movie. Spurred on by his classmate, Nobita decides to actually apply himself for once and works his butt off memorizing his math equations for an upcoming test. He could have used Doraemon's Memory Bread, which lets you memorize anything you write on it after you eat it, but he does it the hard way to prove a point. Only thing is, the day of the test it turns out he had a Japanese test instead, which he absolutely flunks. Much like with Bart Simpson in "Bart Gets an F", you can't help but feel for Nobita after he genuinely put in the work.

The future image of Nobita's family shifts into a picture of Shizuka spanking a kid that looks like it could be Nobita's own. Now, I was fully expecting a twist where it was just Shizuka spanking Nobita's kid without them being married or anything, but that's a bit too far-flung for a movie like this. With the knowledge that there's a chance he can marry Shizuka in the future, Nobita decides to go to fourteen years into the future to ensure that his future self actually proposes to Shizuka in the first place. Turns out, in the interim his house is demolished and turned into a public bathroom.

Char Aznable once said people struggle to acknowledge the mistakes of their youth, what does it say when you struggle with your adult self?

Nobita, true to himself, completely fails at having any foresight and just... gets lost in a blizzard along with Shizuka. But it's cool because Doraemon works off of Bill and Ted rules: Nobita pulls himself out of a jam by just remembering to rescue himself and Shizuka from the blizzard in 14 years.

Much like with Golgo 13: The Professional a few months back, Nobita and company are so firmly engrained in Japanese consciousness that anything else would be a betrayal to 80 years of nostalgia. Nobita actually gaining a spine or becoming halfway competent at something would be like an Ys game where Adol settles down with a girl, or Dick Dastardly winning a race fair and square in Wacky Races. It's not even an interesting subversion of expectations, because... what, now things are better for Nobita? Then what? What fun things could happen if Nobita isn't a total loser? Which is where the climax of the first movie comes in: happy with the news that he'll eventually marry Shizuka, Doraemon has satisfied the parameters for returning to the future, and is obligated to go back. More than being a convenient gadget dispenser, Doraemon is Nobita's friend and the idea of losing him breaks his heart.

And the sequel is a doozy! Right off, it starts with a surprisingly genuine tone: Nobita wants to see his grandmother, who passed away when he was very young. There are a lot of tender moments of Nobita humoring her desire to see him older. Problem is, she also wants to see Nobita get married, so it's back to the future for Nobita and Doraemon as they try to follow up on the wedding between his future self and Shizuka.

I dunno, I found it a bit meandering towards the end. See, the big obstacle in this movie is that Future Nobita is a bit spineless and insecure because he's worried he can't give Shizuka the life she deserves. So he steals the time machine so he can revel in the nostalgia of his past life. Doraemon and Nobita even use a gadget so that both Nobitas trade bodies for the afternoon, so that Future Nobita can really enjoy being a kid again.

Note that I'm already skipping over a huge chunk of the movie that involves Nobita and Doraemon even finding him in the first place; this involves sending Nobita's soul back into his own body at the beginning of the movie and carting Past Nobita back to the beginning but wiping his memory so that the timeline is maintained. The intro even teases these bits, for a fun bit of continuity.

For once, the movie breaks from the Bill and Ted rules and goes into Back To The Future rules: they have a time machine, so they could feasibly take as long as they wanted getting Future Nobita back because they could just return to the very minute they left.

But there's still a time limit: as it turns out, the body-swapping gadget had a fatal defect and if you spend more than an hour in another person's body you lose all your memories. The future gadget salesman even shows up in a pathetic attempt at saving face.

As it turns out, there is collectable fun-money emblazoned with Tezuka characters in Japan, but not Tezuka himself. I fully expect Japan to make commemorative mangaka currency in the future. Put Rumiko Takahashi on the 100000-note or go to hell!

And the irony is that because of the defective gadget, even if he did stick around he wouldn't remember anything in the first place. So it's a failure of a plan before it even begins!

But yes, this bit of the movie lasts for too long, and even though both Nobitas end up catatonic they're able to make the switch back into their proper bodies and Future Nobita is able to deliver a proper speech at his wedding. Nobita even manages to sneak his grandma to the ceremony!

There's another vignette where Nobita addresses a throwaway joke from the beginning of the movie and sees whether he's actually his parents' son, where we learn why his parents named him Nobita. It's a bit of a pun, "Nobita" comes from "Nobiru", which can mean "to grow". In a cruel twist of fate, his parents hoped Nobita would grow. Uh... yeah, about that...

But it all works out: Nobita gets married in the future, so Nobita goes back home happy that he can see his grandmother in the past whenever he wants. Only one of Doraemon's gadgets erases his memory so we're back to square one with Nobita forgetting everything he learned, just as he should.

These stand as perfectly good family movies: the plots are simple, the vignettes are engaging, and the emotions are genuine enough to draw in even adults. It helps that these movies are perfectly stunning as 3D films: much like with the CG Lupin the Third, they perfectly capture the design of the Doraemon stable and bring them to life by maintaining their stretchy antics. Also, more than a few shots are just out-and-out flexing. Doraemon is one of the most beloved characters ever in Japan and by God, they were gonna do him justice.

Oh no. Please don't go giving Doraemon lore.