Doraemon

''Doraemon'' ( ja, ドラえもん ) is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Fujiko F. Fujio. The manga was first serialized in December 1969, with its 1,345 individual chapters compiled into 45 ''tankōbon'' volumes and published by Shogakukan from 1970 to 1996. The story revolves around an earless robotic cat named Doraemon, who travels back in time from the 22nd century to aid a boy named Nobita Nobi.

The manga spawned a media franchise. Three anime TV series have been adapted in 1973, 1979, and 2005. Additionally, Shin-Ei Animation has produced over forty animated films, including two 3D computer animated films, all of which are distributed by Toho. Various types of merchandise and media have been developed, including soundtrack albums, video games, and musicals. The manga series was licensed for an English language release in North America, via Amazon Kindle, by a collaboration of Fujiko F. Fujio Pro with Voyager Japan and AltJapan Co., Ltd. The anime series was licensed by Disney for an English-language release in North America in 2014, and LUK International in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

''Doraemon'' was well-received by critics and became a hit in many Asian countries. It won numerous awards, including the Japan Cartoonists Association Award in 1973 and 1994, the Shogakukan Manga Award for children's manga in 1982, and the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize in 1997. As of 2019, it has sold over 250 million copies worldwide, becoming one of the best-selling manga series in history. ''Doraemon'' is also one of the highest-grossing media franchises of all time, of which the animated film series has the highest number of admissions in Japan. The Doraemon character has been viewed as a Japanese cultural icon, and was appointed as the first "anime ambassador" in 2008 by the country's Foreign Ministry.

Synopsis

Nobita Nobi is a ten-year-old Japanese school boy, who is kind-hearted and honest, but also lazy, unlucky, weak, gets bad grades and is bad at sports. One day, a robot cat from the 22nd century named Doraemon is sent back to the past by Nobita's descendants to take care of Nobita so that his descendants can have a better life. Doraemon has a four-dimensional pouch in which he stores tools, inventions, and gadgets from the future to aid Nobita whenever he is faced with a problem. Although Doraemon is a cat robot, he has a fear of mice because of an incident where robotic mice chewed off his ears. This is why Doraemon lost his original yellow color and turned blue, from sadness.

Nobita has three main friends: Takeshi Goda (nicknamed Gian), Suneo Honekawa (Gian's sidekick), and Shizuka Minamoto, Nobita's best friend and love-interest. Gian is a strong, leading and domineering boy, but also loyal to his friends. Suneo is a wealthy and spoiled boy who uses his friendship with Gian to win the respect of other schoolmates. Shizuka is a gentle and kind girl who frequently plays with Nobita. Nobita has a crush on Shizuka; she is his prospective future wife (Nobita's future wife is initially Gian's younger sister). Although Gian and Suneo are Nobita's friends, they also typically bully and abuse him. Nobita normally responds by using Doraemon's gadgets to fight back against them, but Nobita has a tendency to get carried away with using the gadgets (or Gian and Suneo, if they steal it away), which typically results in unintended consequences for him and others.

In addition to Gian, Suneo, and Shizuka, Dorami and Hidetoshi Dekisugi (common name Dekisugi) are also recurring characters. Dorami is Doraemon's younger sister, and Dekisugi is a gifted student boy who as Shizuka's close friend, frequently attracts the jealousy of Nobita.

Creation and conception

Development and themes

''Doraemon'' is written and illustrated by Fujiko F. Fujio, the pen name of Japanese manga artist Hiroshi Fujimoto. According to Fujio, it was originally conceived following a series of three events: when searching for ideas for a new manga, he wished a machine existed that would come up with ideas for him, he tripped over his daughter's toy, and heard cats fighting in his neighborhood. To set up the plot and characters, he inspired some elements from his earlier manga series, ''Obake no Q-Tarō'', which involve an ''obake'' living with humans, with a similar formula. Fujio said that the idea for ''Doraemon'' came after "an accumulation of trial and error", during which he finally found the most suitable style of manga to him. Initially, the series achieved little success as '' gekiga'' was well-known at the time, and only became a hit after its adaptation into an anime TV series and multiple feature films.

''Doraemon'' is mainly aimed at children, so Fujio chose to create the character with a simple graphic style, based on shapes such as circles and ellipses. He used the same sequences of cartoons with regularity and continuity to enhance the reader's ease of understanding. In addition, blue, a characteristic color of Doraemon, was chosen as the main color in magazine publications, which used to have a yellow cover and red title. Set in Tokyo, the manga reflected parts of Japan's society, such as the class system and the "ideal" of Japanese childhood. Problems, if occur, were resolved in a way so as not to rely on violence and eroticism, and the stories were integrated with the concept of environmentalism. The manga also insisted on the ethical values of integrity, perseverance, courage, family and respect.

In order to underline the crucial role of the young generation in society, the manga's creator chose to have the act carried out in a "children's domain" where young people can live with happiness, freedom and power without adult's interference. As Saya S. Shiraishi noted, the existence of the "domain" helped ''Doraemon'' to have a strong appeal in various Asian countries. During ''Doraemon'''s development, Fujio did not express a change in characters; he said, "When a manga hero become a success, the manga suddenly stops being interesting. So the hero has to be like the stripes on a barber pole; he seems to keep moving upward, but actually he stays in the same place."

According to Zensho Ito, Fujio's former student, the "length" of time in the universe is one of the ideas that inspired Fujio to make ''Doraemon''. Frequently occur in its stories is Nobita's desire to control time, and there exist time-control gadgets that he uses to satisfy that desire, particularly the "Time Machine", which lies in his desk drawer. Unlike Western works on science fiction, the manga did not explain the theory nor the applied technology behind these tools, but instead focusing on how the characters exploit their advantages, making it more children-friendly.

Origin of the name

The name "Doraemon" can be roughly translated to "stray". Unusually, the name is written in a mixture of two Japanese scripts: Katakana () and Hiragana (). "Dora" derives from , and is a corruption of nora (stray), while "-emon" (in kanji ) is an old-fashioned suffix for male names (for example, as in Ishikawa Goemon). Nobita's home address in Tsukimidai ("moon-view-heights"), Nerima refers to Fujimidai ("Fuji-view-heights"), where Osamu Tezuka's residence and animation studio is based. The name "Nobita Nobi" refers to "nobi nobi", meaning "the way a young child grows up free, healthy, and happy, unrestrained in any sense".

Gadgets

Gadgets, or , are Doraemon's tools from the future, usually used to help the characters. Fujio said that Doraemon has a total of 1,293 gadgets; according to a 2004 analysis by Yasuyuki Yokoyama of Toyama University, there are 1,963 gadgets found in 1,344 sketches. The most important gadgets include "Take-Copter", a small piece of headgear made out of bamboo that can allow its users to fly; "Time Machine", a machine used for time travel; "Anywhere Door", a pink-colored door that allows people to travel according to the thoughts of the person who turns the knob; "Time Kerchief", a handkerchief which can turn an object new or old or a person young or old; "Translator Tool", a cuboid jelly that allow one to converse in any language; and "Designer", a camera used to instantly dress-up the user.

Saya S. Shiraishi wrote that most of the gadgets were "an impressive testimony to the standards of quality control and innovation that exist in the twenty-second century". The gadgets were an essential part of the series so as to reflect a positive point of view about the association of technology in children, and to express the wishes of modern society.

Conclusion

The series stopped publishing after Fujimoto's death in 1996, without an ending; this has aroused numerous urban legends throughout the years. One of the most well-known "endings" of the manga was by an amateur manga cartoonist under the pen name "Yasue T. Tajima", first appeared on the Internet in 1998 and made up into a manga in 2005. The story takes place when Doraemon's battery dies, and Nobita later grows up becoming a robot engineer, potentially revive Doraemon and live a happy life. Tajima issued an apology in 2007, and the profits were shared with Shogakukan and the copyright owner, Fujiko F. Fujio Pro.

Ryūichi Yagi and Takashi Yamazaki, the directors of '' Stand by Me Doraemon'', confirmed that it had only one opening, while the ending has been rewritten several times. Because of this, Shogakukan had to clarify that only if the marriage of Nobita and Shizuka is finalized will the mission be accomplished, and then Doraemon will return to the future.

Media

Manga

In December 1969, the ''Doraemon'' manga appeared in six different children's monthly magazines published by Shogakukan: ''Yoiko'', ''Yōchien'', ''Shogaku Ichi-nensei'', ''Shogaku Ni-nensei'', ''Shogaku San-nensei'', and ''Shogaku Yon-nensei''. The magazines were aimed at children from nursery school to fourth grade. In 1973, two other magazines, ''Shogaku Go-nensei'' and ''Shogaku Roku-nensei'' (aimed at fifth-grade and sixth-grade students respectively), started publishing the manga. In 1977, ''CoroCoro Comic'' was launched as the flagship magazine of ''Doraemon.''

Since the debut of ''Doraemon'' in 1969, the stories have been selectively collected into forty-five ''tankōbon'' volumes that were published under Shogakukan's imprint from July 31, 1974 to April 26, 1996. These volumes are collected in the Takaoka Central Library in Toyama, Japan, where Fujio was born. Between April 25, 2005 and February 28, 2006, Shōgakukan published a series of five manga volumes under the title '' Doraemon Plus'' (''Doraemon+''), featuring short stories which did not appear in the forty-five original volumes; a sixth volume, the first volume in eight years, was published on December 1, 2014. Additionally, 119 unpublished stories were compiled into six colored-manga volumes under the title ''Doraemon Kara Sakuhin-shu'' , published from July 17, 1999 to September 2, 2006. For conception, see pp. 158–159. Between July 24, 2009 and September 25, 2012, Shogakukan published a ''master works'' collection consisting of twenty volumes with all 1,345 stories written by Fujio. In December 2019, on the 50th anniversary of ''Doraemon'', a "Volume 0" was published by Shogakukan featuring six different versions of Doraemon's first appearance.

There have been two series of bilingual, Japanese and English, volumes of the manga by SHOGAKUKAN ENGLISH COMICS under the title ''Doraemon: Gadget Cat from the Future'', and two audio versions. The first series has ten volumes and the second one has six. 21st Century Publishing House released bilingual English-Chinese versions in Mainland China, and Chingwin Publishing Group released bilingual English-Chinese versions in Taiwan.

In July 2013, Fujiko F. Fujio Pro announced that they would be collaborating with ebook publisher Voyager Japan and localization company AltJapan Co., Ltd. to release an English-language version of the manga in full color digitally via the Amazon Kindle platform in North America. Shogakukan released the first volume in November 2013; as of 2016, a total of 200 volumes have been published. This English version incorporates a variety of changes to character names; Nobita is "Noby", Shizuka is "Sue", Suneo is "Sneech", and Gian is "Big G", while dorayaki is "Yummy Bun/Fudgy Pudgy Pie". Also, as of 2016, four volumes of the manga have been published in English in print by Shogakukan Asia.

Shogakukan started digital distribution of all forty-five original volumes throughout Japan from July 16, 2015.

Anime

The first attempt of a ''Doraemon'' animated series was in 1973, by Nippon Television. After a January 1973 pilot named ''Doraemon Mirai Kara Yattekuru'' , twenty-six episodes, each with two segments, were broadcast on Nippon TV from April 1 to September 30 of the same year. The series was directed by Mitsuo Kaminashi with voice cast from Aoni Production; the character Doraemon was voiced by Kōsei Tomita, then later by Masako Nozawa. Later in the series, the animation studio, Nippon TeleMovie Productions, went bankrupt, and the masters were sold off or destroyed. The series was re-aired on Nippon TV and several local stations until 1979, when Shogakukan requested Toyama Television to cease broadcasting. Some of the segments were found in the archives of IMAGICA in 1995, and some others were recovered by Jun Masami in 2003. As of 2013, 21 of 52 segments have known to survive, two of which without audio.

''Doraemon'' remained fairly exclusive in manga form until 1979 when a newly formed animation studio, Shin-Ei Animation (now owned by TV Asahi) produced an animated second attempt of ''Doraemon''. The series, directed by Tsutomu Shibayama

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