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 middleof 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.

It broke my heart to see my beloved series, the one that made my childhood, is nothing more than a soulless cash-grab nowadays. Nobita's Earth Symphony (like many other 'new' movies before) is an average, boring mess that fail to understand what makes Doraemon great in the first place. Fujio F. Fujiko is not just an iconic mangaka, he's also a great story-teller. The stories he drew is adventurous, imaginative and larger than life. He's often inspired by adventure stories like One Thousand and One Nights, Treasure Island, Momotaro or Jules Verne's books, etc... As a kid, I wanted to be a partof the gang to discover the world he created. Now, as a 30 year-old man rereading the manga, I still feel the same, nothing has changed, his stories are that mesmerizing. There's always a sense of real danger in his works, it makes the friendships between Nobita and his friends feel real and strong, they've been through trials and always remain loyal to each others. From there, it also highlights the differences in personalities amongst the main cast and flesh them out, that's why those characters are so beloved through generations of viewers. There's none of that in these new movies, there's no tension, there was never a time I feel that they're in real tough situations that needs intelligence and a strong bond of friendship to overcome. Everything is solved quickly through a Dues Ex Machina, it results in a forgettable story that serves no purpose, not even entertaining. I hope they stop making these movie and tarnish the legacy of the series I love. Doraemon deserves so much better than this.

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.

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