Doraemon Movie 03: Nobita no Daimakyou

My overall take: A very solid family adventure film... that I cannot honestly recommend. In this movie, Nobita and his friends explore Central Africa and discover a hidden civilization. This is a film that establishes (or at least solidifies) many recurring elements of future Doraemon films. The main characters go on an adventure in an exotic setting, using Doraemon's gadgets to live and travel comfortably. They come across an isolated society that is being menaced in some way, and team up with newfound allies to overcome the threat. However, even with the reuse of this formula and overlapping themes in later films, I think Nobita andthe Haunts of Evil does a good job at maintaining its own identity and balancing the character focus among its main characters. This movie and its remake both have very ominous-sounding English titles. Based on my limited understanding of Japanese, "Haunts of Evil" is not exactly an inaccurate translation, but in the context of the story, the intended meaning seems closer to "unexplored realm". (The Doraemon movie where they actually encounter demons comes later...) That being said, this probably is one of the darkest Doraemon films, with multiple instances in which one or more of the main characters almost certainly would have died without sheer luck or third-party intervention. It certainly makes for an exciting adventure narrative, if nothing else. If I were grading based solely on the story, I'd probably be willing to give this eight stars. However, there is something that I think audiences should be made aware of before they watch it. There is a scene in this movie that features Indigenous African people, who are depicted with, shall we say... highly caricatured character designs. While acknowledging that a star-based scoring system cannot fully encapsulate issues like this, the least I can do is shave a couple of stars off my intended rating.

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