Doraemon Review

Nobita Nobi is lazy, clumsy and bad at school, and his descendants in the twenty second century are still paying for it, so his great great grandson sends back Doraemon, a round blue robot cat with no ears and a four dimensional pocket, to set him straight. Almost every short story follows the same beats: Nobita is thumped by Gian or outdone by Suneo, begs for a gadget, is handed the Anywhere Door or the bamboo copter, and misuses it until the joke turns back on him.

That formula is the achievement. Fujiko F. Fujio, the name Hiroshi Fujimoto used after the Fujiko Fujio partnership split, draws with a clarity any child can read, and each gadget is a small thought experiment about what a wish would really do once granted. Shizuka, Gian and Suneo are archetypes now, recognised across Asia, and the longer adventures collected as the long tales take the same children to the age of dinosaurs, to other planets and to the sea floor.

The repetition is real, and the gag rhythm barely varies across forty five volumes. The book won the Shogakukan Manga Award in 1982 and the first grand prize of the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize in 1997, a year after its author's death.