Doraemon Movie 13: Nobita to Kumo no Oukoku

My overall take: An interesting Doraemon movie with a lot of novelty, though most rewarding to longtime Doraemon fans.

In this movie, Nobita and his friends build a kingdom in the clouds, only to find an actual civilization hidden in the clouds. I quite like this one. At its core, it's another 90s environmentalist movie, but the central conflict is more nuanced than the one in the similarly-themed Nobita and the Animal Planet (1990). The main characters actually spend time reflecting on humanity's actions here, instead of simply facing off against "bad humans from a different planet". (Although Nobita and the Animal Planet did reference environmental ... issues on Earth proper, they did not form a central part of the plot.) At the same time, the cloud people with their sustainable civilization are not portrayed as being entirely virtuous either.

In addition to the conflict being morally grayer than usual, this film does quite a few new things for the Doraemon cinematic lineup. For example, it is the first movie in which Doraemon is rendered out of commission for an extended period of time, forcing the kids to get by without him for a while. This story also establishes that Doraemon has a rock-solid head (a lore addition that future films will regularly make use of), introduces a timer setting on the Anywhere Door allowing users to travel to a preset time, and shows Nobita and Doraemon soliciting funds from their friends to complete their latest project. Speaking of which, it's a lot of fun to watch them construct their Kingdom of Clouds.

Furthermore, this may be the only Doraemon movie that contains multiple explicit, plot-relevant references to the mainline series. Reappearing in this film are the moa and the dodo from "Moa and Dodos Forever" (1978 manga chapter, 1981 anime episode), the Lilliputians from "Hui of Donjara Village" (1984 manga chapter and anime episode) and Kibo the walking tree from "Goodbye, Kibo!" (1984 manga chapter and anime episode), now an adult tree. (Although that does raise the question of how Kibo was able to grow to adulthood when Nobita and his friends haven't aged at all...)

My main criticism of this film is that it's so jam-packed, some plot points show up with little to no chance for explanation. (And seriously, we did not need that five-second scene of Shizuka showering, barely censored...) For example, what is that healing energy Kibo uses to revive an unconscious Doraemon at the end? However, a more noticeable case might be the backstory of the cloud people: apparently the founders of the cloud civilization discovered that the clouds had become solid after a comet had passed by near the Earth, but how the comet was able to affect the clouds in this way is never revealed. Given that Doraemon tends to ascribe scientific or technological explanations to such phenomena, it's strange to see an origin story like this left with no clearly stated "rational" explanation.

Funnily, early in the movie, Nobita asks Doraemon how his Cloud-solidifying Gas gadget works, but Doraemon essentially replies, "That is a good question, but it would take too long to explain, so I won't." One has to wonder whether the author intentionally inserted this exchange to acknowledge how little would be explained in the story itself!