Doraemon Movie 43: Nobita no Chikyuu Symphony

My overall take: A nice tribute to the human affinity for music, despite some pacing issues.

In this movie, Nobita and his friends respond to a mysterious request seeking help from "talented musicians". I was very intrigued when I first heard about the premise, because music is a theme that the Doraemon films had not really explored before. Now that the movie has been released, I'm happy to report that I had a pretty good time with it. Beyond the handling of its main subject matter, I enjoyed that the foreshadowing here was surprisingly well thought out. There's so much setup in the beginning and middle ... of the story that pays off at the end. This includes the use of a gadget (the Future Diary) that would probably be considered "too overpowered" to be acknowledged in a typical Doraemon movie!

The film does have its flaws, of course, and the biggest in my opinion come down to the pacing. Several moments that are framed as emotional or dramatic are resolved or brushed aside too quickly, when they would've benefited from being given more time and gravitas. There's also some ending fatigue that kept me second-guessing, "Is this the climax? No, wait, is this the climax?"

However, the actual climax is quite nicely done and well worth experiencing in theaters for full effect. (It's a musical performance after all, as is pretty much a given in a movie about music.) As a tribute to the importance and appeal of music to humanity, I think the movie is very much a success.

As usual for a Doraemon movie, most of the character focus is on Nobita and his new movie-exclusive friends, but the rest of the main cast does have an active presence throughout. One thing I would've liked to see is more elaboration on why each character is deemed compatible with the instruments that they're assigned for their performances. Gian is said to be suited to playing the tuba due to his lung capacity, and the relevance of the recorder to Nobita's character arc is self-evident, but no such explanations are given for why Suneo gets the violin or why Shizuka is assigned to percussion.

Speaking of which, I thought there were some missed opportunities for Shizuka's involvement considering that she's the one main character who has an established affinity for playing musical instruments outside of school. Even so, the movie does at least acknowledge both her piano and violin playing (albeit the latter only during the end credits). It's also refreshing to see a Doraemon movie that doesn't contain a bath scene or any other similarly distasteful joke involving her.

Review summary: The theme is "Music". It's fun to watch. But, The adventures along the way seem a little boring. However, at the end, All play a grand orchestra. Highly recommended.

(+)Music is the theme. Of course it will be a fun movie.
This year's movie theme was "Music." I think it was a difficult theme, but it turned out to be a very enjoyable movie. Doraemon and his friends also move in a very comical way to match the music.
Most Japanese children learn to play the recorder in elementary school because it is easy to carry, durable, and inexpensive. It is chosen as one of the ... best instruments for learning finger movements, breathing, and melody. (The recorder sounds that Nobita makes were performed by Kurihara from the Kuricorder Quartet, my favorite band.)

(+)The guest characters are cute
This time, the character who will join Nobita on his adventure is "Mikka". Her character design and voice are both very cute. I also felt that the color of Doraemon's blue was adjusted to match Mikka.

(+)Science elements are included
Doraemon is a science fiction story called "Sukoshi Fushigi." Elements that make children interested in space are silently embedded as important points in the story.

(-)In the middle of the story, it's unclear what the goal is.
In the middle of the story, Doraemon and Nobita and his friends go on an adventure, but it was hard to understand why they were heading forward. (For example, if they were heading towards a big enemy, it would be clear, but that wasn't the case this time.)


Well,
There is an enemy in this movie, but you'll be able to figure out what it is. We, and especially musicians, have had a hard time in the last few years. At the end of the movie, a huge symphony plays. I remembered and cried. This is the most unforgettable Doraemon movie I've seen in recent years. It was a wonderful earth symphony performance!

(FYI, In the Weekly Doraemon TV series, I can watch not only the animated versions of the original manga, but also new original stories. Like this movie, Sometimes, current topics are featured in the new stories. The Doraemon animation team is creative! A memorial movie for the 90th anniversary of Fujiko F Fujio's birth. Thank you for the fun work.)

I'm usually really picky about music-related shows, but this one has so many problems I don't even need to get into the music portion of it. If anything, the music portion was great, beautiful soundtrack, nice arrangements, some hidden trivial gems for music nerds to find, that was all fun. But the underlying structure of the movie was extremely unstable and made the overall movie one of the weakest Doraemon movies produced.

To start, the pacing was horrible. There's a really dull length of the film where it attempts to introduce the viewers to the world-building and how the music spaceship works. ... But the whole tour felt extremely lifeless and difficult to engage with. None of the guest characters had any depth to them, and when they started talking about their past and their home planet, a lot of it was explanation and not a lot of showing.

The sequence of information was uncomfortable too. We are given so many different directions of information, like the opening scene that is set to a long time ago, all the way to the world-building of the entire spaceship. It was hard to keep up, and I found myself getting distracted by thoughts of "when will I find out about [insert topic]" rather than enjoying the movie. At least all my questions were answered, but a lot of them were cheaply convenient coincidences only planned out for plot points. This made the takeaway/relief of the cinematic tension really weak and not worthwhile. It seems that this is a common plot technique for a lot of the Mizuta-era Doraemon films where they sprinkle a lot of seemingly unrelated hints at the exposition of the movie to have all of it come together to resolve the ending like a cool puzzle, but these hints often feel way too convenient to pass on as mere coincidences, and especially so for this movie.

As much as I enjoyed the concept of music and the stakes of a world without music as the main conflict, there was no definite antagonist in this movie, which is a first for a Doraemon film I think. Whatever the "antagonist" was supposed to be literally had zero personality, like comparable to a virus or worm or whatever, which really threw me off because it felt like they were developing the movie as if there would be a mastermind behind all this, but then there wasn't.

With all these problems related to the storyline, the movie could have simply sufficed as a music video featuring Doraemon. None of the guest characters had any depth to them, and the film ran excessively on convenient coincidences to force the movie towards a clean conclusion. Any cinematic tension that was relieved felt weak, and I felt myself thinking "oh, okay...." many times. The music was nice, but if you want nice music in a children's show, there are tons out there with better storylines.