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“Doraemon” has been on Indian television for 21 years, long enough, by TV Asahi‘s reckoning, for the franchise to start passing from one generation of viewers to the next. Now the Japanese broadcaster is taking the franchise into cinemas.
“Doraemon the Movie: New Nobita and the Castle of the Undersea Devil” opens across India on Oct. 2 in the Hindi, Tamil and Telugu languages, with Japan’s TV Asahi and India’s PVR Inox Pictures leading the theatrical release. Licensing and brand consultancy Black White Orange (BWO) is handling fan engagement, consumer experiences and promotional activations, and Happening 365 Synergies is advising on strategy and the market.
Ahead of the release, Variety spoke with three of the companies that look after the franchise: TV Asahi; Shin-Ei Animation, which produced the film; and Fujiko Pro, the office that represents creator Fujiko F. Fujio, the pen name of Fujimoto Hiroshi.
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“The success in India for TV Asahi is longevity,” says Sumida Maiko, head of animation and sales in TV Asahi’s international business department. “We have had ‘Doraemon’ for 21 years now but we are looking at 50 and 100 years… To achieve that, we are planning to expand the ‘Doraemon’ brand in a 360 degree approach.”
Sumida says TV Asahi had been biding its time until Indian audiences were ready to embrace animated features on the big screen, and that the undersea adventure is “a very powerful title that would match with the Indian fans.”
The language strategy comes straight from television, where “Doraemon” has long reached what Sumida calls “our little ‘Doraemon’ fans” in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. “We wanted to keep it that way for the theater release,” she says.
India’s anime market has grown fast, much of it on the back of younger, intensely engaged fandoms. “Doraemon” draws from a wider pool of children, parents and adults who grew up with the show, and Sumida says the current anime surge will not alter TV Asahi’s approach to the franchise. “‘Doraemon’ was born as a manga comic dedicated to the children and we are proud to have the animation to be accepted as a kids and family content,” she says. “It will be passed on from kids who watch ‘Doraemon’ to those who grew up watching ‘Doraemon’ and then back to the kids of those who watched ‘Doraemon.’ It transcends the generations.”
In Japan, a new “Doraemon” film opens almost every year. “There will always be a possibility for doing something like that here in India in the coming years,” Sumida says, adding that India ranks among TV Asahi’s most important markets and that the company wants to expand into, and explore, new businesses there.
The film itself reworks a story that first reached Japanese cinemas in 1983.
“I wanted to do it because the original is exactly the same age as I am. Just kidding,” says Nakajima Susumu, chief producer of the film at Shin-Ei Animation.
The studio has remade several “Doraemon” stories, but Nakajima says this one stood out as an early feature-length entry that was also a big favorite with audiences. “This applies to all our remakes, but I am firmly convinced that Fujimoto-sensei’s works remain entertaining no matter how many years have passed,” he says. “This work was also serialized as a manga and produced over 40 years ago, but I believe that when children today watch it, they will feel the same sensations and enjoyment that children back then experienced.”
Some things are off-limits. Nakajima says the team leaves the fun of the original, its narrative structure and the feeling audiences take home untouched. “Since the original is a manga, we translate the ‘post-reading feeling’ into a ‘post-viewing feeling’ for the movie, and we place great importance on whether that feeling remains unchanged and whether we are successfully expressing the fun inherent in the original work,” he says. “Just because it’s a remake, we don’t intentionally think, ‘Let’s change things from the original.’”
The visuals are a different matter. Audiences have grown far more discerning, Nakajima says, with a vast number of works now out in the world, and the range of what animators can express has widened considerably in 40 years. The production leans on CG and compositing, yet Nakajima says that “it might sound counterintuitive, but we also cherish the charm of hand-drawn animation – that sort of ‘fluctuation’ or analog warmth.”
Undersea settings are no longer the novelty they may have been in 1983. What sets this story apart, Nakajima says, is that Nobita, a human, ends up beneath the waves because he was bathed in the glow of the Adaptation Ray. “Therefore, we aimed to create visuals that consciously differentiate our work, particularly in how the underwater world looks and the colors used from the moment he is bathed in the ray and thereafter.”
Scale brings its own problem. A “Doraemon” movie has to be bigger than a television episode without losing the characters audiences know.
“‘Doraemon-ness’ is very important, isn’t it?” Nakajima says. “Even if it’s a movie, having Nobita and the gang act like their usual selves, and depicting them that way, is exactly what leads to that sense of intimacy.”
The five core characters behave as they always do, he says. It’s their circumstances that change, which makes Nobita’s words easier to relate to and Gian’s actions more dependable.
“The spectacle and adventure parts are something we struggle with every time, wondering, ‘Where should we go next…?’ With the Time Machine, the Anywhere Door, and other secret gadgets, any dream can come true, so we craft the story while carefully considering the overall balance.”
For the Indian versions, Shin-Ei checks whether the names of gadgets and other proper nouns suit the local context. Because the production team isn’t very familiar with the nuances of the languages, it coordinates the localization through its international team.
At Fujiko Pro, the work begins with Fujimoto himself. “Even if times change, the essence of children remains unchanged,” says Yoshida Kenji, a corporate officer at the office. Adults, Yoshida says, drift away from a child’s heart as their perspective rises, and end up depicting their idea of what a child should be. “That is why Fujimoto-sensei confronted the child’s heart within himself and brought that child into his works.”
That conviction shapes how Fujiko Pro handles the property. Yoshida says the office does not intend to “evolve” Fujimoto’s work. “That is because we believe the world he created has universal value – one that is loved across eras and borders,” he says.
If he had to name what must be protected, Yoshida says, the first thing is that “Doraemon” was created for children. “So, whatever we do, we want to keep the goal of ‘for children’ in mind without fail. At the same time, we produce it while keeping in mind the ‘child’s heart’ that exists within adults as well. In that sense, we consider it a work that is loved by all generations.”
Children today are growing up around AI, robots and devices that once belonged to science fiction, and Yoshida concedes that reality has, in some ways, caught up with Doraemon’s gadgets.
“However, I don’t believe Fujiko F. Fujio-sensei was trying to predict the future when he drew those ideas,” he says. “I think he was simply expressing his own childlike curiosity and wishes through the secret gadgets, and as a result, some of those gadgets happen to have become reality today. That is why I believe that no matter how much times change, the world of “Doraemon” will continue forward just as it always has.”
