Doraemon Movie 22: Nobita to Tsubasa no Yuusha-tachi

My overall take: A fun movie that unfortunately has an unpolished feel to its plot.

In this movie, Nobita and his friends stumble across a portal leading to a land inhabited by bird people. This is unquestionably an exciting film to watch, with the race sequence partway through and the final struggle against the main threat being particular highlights. The concept of a bird civilization is also of special interest to me, as a paleontologist who studies birds. However, I've long thought that the story lacks a sense of coherence in following the plot threads that it introduces.

One of the most obvious examples of this is ... that the primary villain becomes a non-entity as soon as his plan goes sideways and a greater threat appears. He is not even given a cameo appearance or a passing mention when all is said and done. Does he still retain his leadership position in the bird military? Has his perspective changed at all as a result of this incident? The movie does not say.

Then there's the character of Icarus the eagle-man, who is built up as a legendary figure in bird society. When he finally enters the story in the flesh, he proceeds to spend his screentime accomplishing... not very much. Nearly all of his contributions probably could have been written out of the film with little difficulty. Even the reveal that he's the biological father of the protagonists' new friend, Gusuke, amounts to almost no narrative importance (and is never disclosed to the main characters or to Gusuke himself).

I also felt that there were many missed opportunities with the portrayal of the bird civilization. To be fair, it's more fleshed out than the animal society from Nobita and the Animal Planet (1990), but not by a whole lot. Even a few more relatively basic references to real-world bird biology could have enhanced the worldbuilding-why not have the owl professor be nocturnal? (One scene shows him working at night, but in an "academic doing late-night research" kind of way.) There's no shortage of interesting elements in bird physiology and behavior to draw from that could have made the bird people much more than simply "flying humans that hatch from eggs". (Why yes, I am a degreed bird biologist overthinking a children's anime...)

In addition, it would have been nice to see the main characters display quirks and abilities based on the Bird Hats that they wear to blend into bird society. At one point, Gian is shown to require a running take-off because he is wearing an albatross hat. I would have liked to see more moments like that. (Ironically, this is something that Nobita and the Animal Planet did better.)