alalbertonykus
August 30, 2025
Recommended
My overall take: I may have bought into the hype just a bit too much, but a solid movie nonetheless. In this movie, Nobita and his friends travel through a painting and end up in 13th-Century medieval Europe. I generally haven't been as taken with director Yukiyo Teramoto's movies as the rest of the Doraemon fandom seems to be. Her previous works include Nobita's New Great Adventure into the Underworld (2007), Nobita and the New Steel Troops (2011), and Nobita's Secret Gadget Museum (2013), all of which I have mixed feelings about but are frequently hailed by other fans as some of the best movies inthe franchise. Will Nobita's Art World Tales, Teramoto's first new Doraemon film in over a decade, break this pattern?
This movie is certainly beloved by the wider fandom: as of the time of writing, it has a score of 4.1/5 on the Japanese film review site Filmarks, whereas no other Doraemon film has a score exceeding 4.0. As for what I think: if nothing else, this is my favorite of Teramoto's Doraemon films by far, and I would unequivocally consider it a good movie for the franchise.
Just about everything in this movie was very competently done. The visuals are top notch, as would be expected for a movie about art, with a wide variety of art styles brilliantly depicted. The story is plotted out well and makes good use of (sometimes pretty layered) foreshadowing. Much like how Nobita's Earth Symphony (2024) nicely portrayed the human affinity for music as a main theme, one of the core messages in Art World Tales is that more than technical skill, it is one's ability to create something unique for what they enjoy that gives meaning to making art, a sentiment that will likely resonate with many artists watching the film.
This movie doubles as a commemoration of the 45th anniversary of Doraemon movies, and it contains many parallels to past films in the franchise: for example, disruption of the space–time continuum being a plot point as in Nobita and the Birth of Japan (1989), the use of a gadget to enter fictional worlds as in Nobita's Dorabian Nights (1991), and an encounter with a demonic antagonist with petrification powers as in Nobita's Great Adventure into the Underworld (1984). At the same time, I think Art World Tales successfully avoids feeling like too much of a retread.
All of that being said, do I agree that this is one of if not the best Doraemon films ever, as overall ratings seem to imply? That I am not so sure about. Like with many other Doraemon movies, I think it struggles somewhat with pacing; in this case, the second half in particular feels like it moves a bit too quickly, an impression perhaps exacerbated by the fact that this is the shortest 2D-animated Doraemon movie since 2017. In fact, an especially jarring jump occurs right about halfway through the movie, when Nobita and Doraemon visit the 13th-Century town of Arturia for the second time. They are initially the only main characters in the party and remain so for some time, but a scene cut later and they are suddenly joined by Shizuka, without so much as a reference as to when or how she got there. The film's climax, which I generally like, also has a few plot points that stood out as overly convenient to me. Admittedly, my expectations going into this movie were elevated by the hype from initial audience reactions, which undoubtedly colored my perceptions of the film. If it hadn't been for that, perhaps I would not have found these (unquestionably minor) issues as noticeable.
Speaking of which, something I'd been led to believe from both promotional materials and viewer reactions was that Shizuka played a big role in this movie. It's true: she gets some very good moments here. This is arguably her best outing in a post-2005 Doraemon movie that isn't a remake of an older film, though I will confess that I had been expecting even more, considering that most of her best scenes had already been shown in trailers and previews for the movie. In fact, I was surprised by just how much of the final act had been included in the trailers, to the point where I was able to predict most of the main plot beats in the second half of the movie while watching. That's probably on me for paying so much attention to the promotions, however.
To answer the question posed in the first paragraph then: Art World Tales follows the trend of Teramoto's other entries in that I apparently don't like it quite as much as most everyone else appears to. This time, however, I can state without reservation that I still find it very good.
