In this movie, Nobita and his friends essentially play a fantasy role-playing game in their dreams. This was a childhood favorite of mine, and I had a good time seeing it again. It boasts an arresting adventure, an intimidating villain, and one of the best roles for Shizuka in any of the Doraemon movies. It also ranks among the darkest Doraemon entries, with several antagonists and even main characters being killed onscreen. That's fine though, because the entire escapade takes place in a dream, right? Not quite, because the machine facilitating it has a setting to reverse the dream world and reality!
As fun as this movie is to watch, the interactions between the dream world and the real world raise many questions. How was the villain's bird-like minion able to enter the real world before the game had even been activated? Why does the robot who retrieves the Dream-making Machine in the end look and sound like the bird person? Why is Nobita's school suddenly on top of the hill in the closing scene of the movie? So many mysteries... To make things even more confusing, the resemblance between the bird person and the robot, as well as the the placement of the school on the hill, were not present in the manga version of this story, so they must have been deliberate creative decisions added by the filmmakers. (Yes, I've seen the obvious fan theories about how this all indicates that the main characters never escaped from the dream in the end.) On the other hand, maybe that kind of surrealism is exactly what you should expect from a story a like this.
In any case, there's no time to dwell on that, because there's an upbeat ending song! All's well that ends well? (For real, the end credits song and illustrations are cute.)
