Doraemon: Nobita and the Robot Kingdom

Tsutomu Shibayama's 2002 Doraemon film is set on a distant planet where humans and robots live together. The empress of the Robot Kingdom plans to strip the robots of their emotions; while trying to stop this, Nobita and his friends also help a robot boy named Poko. The film's idea is that removing emotion is presented as a solution. The empress's reasoning is not malice but a wish to abolish pain, which gives it a moral complexity uncommon in the series. The animation sits at the series' television standard of the period and its visual ambition is limited. The narrative is built for young viewers; the pace is fast, the humour plentiful and the danger never genuinely frightening. Who it's for: family audiences following the Doraemon series. Who it's not for: viewers expecting high animation quality; the film is at the scale of television production.