Doraemon Movie 29: Shin Nobita no Uchuu Kaitakushi

My overall take: Was not a big fan of the original, but the changes here largely fell flat.

This is a remake of The Records of Nobita, Spaceblazer (1981), in which Nobita and Doraemon meet the pioneering settlers of a distant planet and protect them from an evil corporation that wants to mine the planet's resources. As with the other early movies to come out of the 2005 Doraemon anime reboot, this is a very visually interesting movie that experiments a lot with the art and animation style. Although the general story remains the same as the original, there are also some substantial changes to the ... plot. I liked that in this version, Doraemon offers a reasonable-sounding solution to Nobita's request to provide a new vacant lot for him and his friends to play in, instead of the bizarre "solution" he comes up with in the original (which is to bring out a miniature baseball field so the kids can watch miniature figurines play baseball... potentially interesting, but not quite what they asked for).

Besides that, however, I thought most of the other narrative changes fell flat. The biggest alteration is the addition of an entirely new character, Morina, who goes through her own subplot that turns out to be critical to the final resolution of the movie. Unfortunately, despite having a tragic backstory, she doesn't come across as particularly sympathetic or involved with the main plot for most of the film. As a result, I didn't find her story arc very engaging, especially in contrast to the resolution of the original movie, which made elegant use of a gadget (the Time Cloth) that had been set up earlier in the story. So even though I'm not crazy about the 1981 film, I still recommend it strongly over this version. For whatever faults it might have, it at least tells a more cohesive story than the remake.