Doraemon Movie 06: Nobita no Little Star Wars

My overall take: Pretty good if one can forgive the main source of tension being a relatively weak thread.

In this movie, Nobita and his friends meet some tiny aliens and help them overthrow a dictatorship. Even though the premise didn't immediately grab me, this film has a lot going for it in my book. For starters, it is one of the few in which Suneo gets a prominent role, not only in plot relevance but also in character focus. Given that he can often come across as the least sympathetic and most neglected of the main characters, that's a very welcome development.

Shizuka also has some ... good scenes here, despite getting forced into the damsel-in-distress role at one point. She is quickly rescued and remains an active participant in the story afterward, so I suppose I can let that slide. In fact, one of my other favorite elements of this movie is that Shizuka and Suneo share several scenes together, which is a very rarely-seen dynamic in the franchise.

The villains of this film may not be the most powerful among those that Doraemon and friends have faced, but they're probably some of the most threatening. They see through or circumvent nearly every strategy that the heroes come up with, and in the end are only defeated through circumstances that they couldn't have predicted. That, however, brings me to the main weakness of this movie...

Throughout the story, tension is maintained by the fact that the main characters have shrunk themselves down using Doraemon's Small Light, which gets stolen by the villains. As shown in the final battle, the Lilliputian aliens are barely a threat when the Earthlings are at their normal size. Therefore, the protagonists' primary goal for much of the film is to retrieve the Small Light so they can reverse the shrinking effect. That may sound reasonable enough, but it completely ignores the fact that Doraemon also owns a Big Light (with the power to enlarge objects, if the name didn't give that away), which should have readily solved this problem.

To be fair, this is a common issue with Doraemon films. For almost every time the main characters are supposedly in some kind of crisis, dedicated Doraemon fans can probably name a gadget that could have resolved the situation. However, this example stands out in particular, because the Big Light is a gadget that makes regular appearances in the franchise (including in the previous movie!). If one can look past this apparent oversight, however, I think there's more to like about this movie than not.

Doraemon the Movie: Nobita's Little Space War continues the trend of Doraemon movies always having extremely interested premises executed in the most basic way possible. This time around, the gang meet a tiny alien who is fleeing a war back home so they are called in to action to help. Probably my favourite portion of this movie was the opening sequence, as it featured a mix of film references to keep it interesting including Star Wars, E.T., King Kong and even the MGM intro. I found this to be an especially delightful way to open the movie and to pay respect to the key sources ... of inspiration for the film, as upon watching you will soon realise that it is essentially an amalgamation of all of those films in to one. I also appreciated that the story felt more cohesive from start to finish this time around, as Papi is introduced very early on and the alien/space war remains integral to every scene. However, as usual the film falters in the second half, offering little originality to keep the movie fresh as it goes on. Instead, it returns to the safe adventure and action that has defined the majority of the Doraemon films so far. This far into the series, I would expect one knows if they are a Doraemon fan or not and this film will certainly appease those looking for another fun Doraemon adventure, but it ultimately does not deliver a satisfying experience for anyone searching for anything more than that.