Doraemon Movie 08: Nobita to Ryuu no Kishi

My overall take: Fascinating from a meta perspective, but not the most engaging Doraemon movie.

In this movie, Nobita and his friends find a dinosaur civilization underground. As a paleontologist, what interests me the most about this movie is the scientific inspiration behind it. The idea that troodontid dinosaurs could have evolved into human-like sapient forms had they avoided extinction was directly based on a thought experiment put forward by paleontologist Dale Russell in 1982. The film also depicts a bolide impact as the cause of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, a relatively new and controversial idea at the time. By the way, this won't be the ... last appearance of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction in a Doraemon movie...

Sadly, I didn't find most of this movie quite as engaging as its premise might suggest. I did appreciate the reveal close to the ending, and the fact that there's no irredeemably evil villain to be defeated is a pretty fresh concept for a Doraemon film, with the main source of conflict turning out to be a misunderstanding. However, it takes a long time for these pieces to fall into place. It might have been that I went into this film knowing that Russell-inspired dinosauroids played a major role (whereas the protagonists don't learn that they're dealing with sapient dinosaurs until over halfway through the story), but I thought that the setup took far too long. The lead-up to the main plot in Doraemon movies can often be quite enjoyable, with Doraemon frequently showing off a wide variety of gadgets to help the main characters navigate hazardous terrain or convert inhospitable environments into comfortable living quarters. Yet what little there is of that here felt relatively short and unmemorable. Much more time is spent on a subplot where Suneo keeps catching glimpses of the underground dinosaurs and tries to convince the others that what he's seeing is real, which eventually puts them in contact with the dinosauroid civilization but wasn't particularly compelling otherwise.

There are also aspects of the worldbuilding that I thought could have been fleshed out more. For example, in addition to the city-dwelling, technologically advanced dinosauroids that the main characters get to know, we see that the underground world is home to at least one other sapient culture, consisting of a kappa-like species that leads forager lifestyles. Are those also descendants of troodontids? That is never explained, and the foragers are never portrayed as anything more than secondary antagonists. In the end, I think this is a fascinating Doraemon movie, but not one that lives up to its full potential as a work of entertainment.