Doraemon vs. Mobile Suit Gundam?

The latest Doraemon movie will hit cinema screens across Japan in early March, when I'm fairly certain it'll surge straight to the top in box office receipts in the very first weekend it plays.

That process is actually like clockwork every year in this country.

But despite the fact he isn’t at all well known in the Western world, this isn’t some recent-hit sensation – and the title has a history to die for (or at the very least to swoon over in gob-smacked new ways) in terms of anime.

For starters in 2002 Time Magazine dubbed Doraemon the cuddliest hero in Asia, and in 2008 the Japanese Foreign Ministry appointed him their first anime cultural ambassador.

Doraemon started out in manga form in the 1960s, fashioned by Fujiko F. Fujio – a smoke screen coined by its real creator Hiroshi Fujimoto.


It did the big switch to TV in 1973, promptly fizzled, and then was revamped by TV Asahi six years later.

Doraemon hasn’t surrendered his grip on Japanese TVs over the three decades since, or the Japanese everyman’s psyche; I swear that every person in this place can draw his happy face.

And yet while you might be forgiven for thinking this show must set some sort of TV animation record (The Simpsons is a decade younger), it in fact comes in second to another Japanese series, Sazae-san (40 years on air).

Then there are over two-dozen theatrical movies, including the latest, which is titled 映画ドラえもん 新・のび太と鉄人兵団 ～はばたけ 天使たち～, or just plain Doraemon: Nobita and the New Steel Troops: ~Angel Wings~.

Regular readers here, if you indeed do exist, have probably picked up that I’m not a fan of these squiggly “~” things that Japanese animation companies just love to use when they translate their titles from Japanese to English. I know I whine about it often enough.

But grammatical aesthetics aside, the film looks to be a wonderful piece of robot-army-invading-Earth-mayhem, and in the Doraemon universe this promises to be a hoot rather than anything bone-chilling like Michael Bay‘s disgraceful work on Transformers.


So what’s the franchise fuss all about, anyhow?

Doraemon, it turns out, is a blue, dysfunctional mechanical cat from the future (of course) who has no ears but boasts a magical, four-dimensional pouch the envy of any self-prepossessing marsupial.

He’s been sent back in time to sort out Nobita, the good-for-nothing school kid ancestor of the people who built him – but usually instead of accomplishing his task, complete madness breaks out that includes subtle, often ingenious anime references to domestic culture (Mobile Suit Gundam is cheekily alluded to in the new movie) as well as Hollywood classics like West Side Story.

The saga also has some serious psychological eccentricities: for starters, aside from regular panic attacks, our motorized feline suffers from an ongoing musophobia that stems back to the future – to a time in the 22nd century when his ears were consumed by a robotic mouse.

While the TV show focus on Nobita’s bizarre everyday family life and neighbours, the movies go for a more exotic, adventurous edge, but they’ve been a bit rear-visionist in recent years: Nobita’s Great Adventure into the Underworld (2007) may have been the 27th feature released by distributor TOHO (of Godzilla notoriety, who do on average one Doraemon flick per year), but it was in fact a rebake of the sixth – released way back in 1984.

Besides, exotic locations are nowhere near as appealing as Doraemon and Nobita themselves, their time traveling exploits and outrageous futuristic devices, their essentially whacked-out neighbourhood buddies, and an insane overriding story arc.


These have made Doraemon a smash also in China and South Korea, yet he remains a largely unknown entity in the English-speaking world – a happenstance that I truly believe to be bordering on unforgivable ignorance.

Just look at the evidence – our fave feline was voted “cool” by 19 votes to 10 (three people opted out ‘cos they didn’t know who Doraemon was) in a two-month poll at the highly esteemed Doraemon Is Cool website.

By the way, I am kidding you. Really. It’s not quite as esteemed as all that.

At least The Orb got it right. As much as I rarely champion their music, they did a very cool video clip to their track ‘From a Distance’ (on the Bicycles & Tricycles album, 2004) that tracks the printing up of a Doraemon manga – then embarks in some trippy cut-ups of characters and images from the series.




Doraemon © FUJIKO PRO

Keroro Gunso / Sgt. Frog

This newsflash just in from the battlefront ‘burbs: Militant extraterrestrial frogs do dig anime, in particular the many series that happen to include Gundam in their title.

And when it comes to digging, let it be known that I love Keroro Gunso (ケロロ軍曹, aka Sgt. Frog outside Japan).

Mostly I think I'm enamoured with Keroro's erstwhile colleague and sparring partner, the battle-scarred Giroro - voiced by the sublime Jōji Nakata, an otaku fave who also provided the vocal workouts for Alucard in Hellsing and Roy Revant in Solty Rei; in addition Nakata dubbed Gerard Butler's Leonidis in 300 and Reverend Lovejoy in The Simpsons Movie.

My daughter Cocoa and I just now watched the latest installment in a series that kick-started before she was even born.

Keroro Gunso has been bouncing off the walls on TV Tokyo - via Gundam studio Sunrise Inc. - for almost 6 years now (it began in April 2004), adapted from the original manga by Mine Yoshizaki.

“You don't need to be logical to have fun,” stressed the show’s producer, Makoto Shiraishi, from TV Tokyo when I interviewed him for Anime Insider magazine a while back. “We thought both children and adults could enjoy this series.”


The emphasis here is that it’s not just kids who adore this seemingly innocuous children’s anime - it's also relatively consistently rated towards the the top in the viewing habits of Japanese otaku, if their message-boards and blogs are to be believed.

“Keroro is very cute,” says Harumi H, a self-confessed “hardcore otaku” salary-man from Tokyo who has his own blog and adores this show. He was once my student, so I get these quotes in a pinch.

"Keroro’s also a little stupid," Harumi goes on.

"It's funny that he’s supposed to be an invader, but instead lives with and sponges off the Earthlings, and then gets into the culture of Japan. For otaku, many of the parodies in the series concern Gundam, Doraemon, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Dragon Ball Z, Ultraman, Urusei Yatsura, Durty Pair, Macross, and so on; it's difficult to count all the parodies but it's very funny to find them!”

Shiraishi, the producer, agreed that the show’s success over the past few years in Japan related to its ability to transcend barriers.

“Though it was popular with otaku people in the beginning, it’s since also been embraced by children and their families,” he reported.

It’s basically the story of a slippery character called Keroro, an alien from a race of frog-like critters who set their sights on an invasion of the unsuspecting Earth.

Part of an advance party reconnoitering the local terrain, Keroro’s cover is blown in the Hinata family household, the invasion is called-off - and he’s stranded to the whims of the family’s kids.

Life for Keroro is no longer that of a globe-trotting master of menace, but instead filled with mundane activities like household chores and keeping the kids at bay, sorting out the various hangers-on from his destitute invasion squad – and putting together Gundam model kits in those precious few moments of freedom.

There's set-piece action still, and more recently the show has gone back to its spatial roots, but this is a Sunrise production after all, and more than half the cast and crew – including director Yusuke Yamamoto - worked on one Gundam off-shoot or another.

“I'm a fan – now,” Shiraishi said of the influential Gundam franchise itself.

“In the past I knew about Gundam, but I had no particular interest in it until I met Keroro. I became a big fan after that!”

Most of the other seiyuu are no slouches either: Keroro is played by Kumiko Watanabe (Shippo in Inu Yasha), Kururu by Takehito Koyasu (who voiced Shigeru Aoba in Neon Genesis Evangelion), while Tomoko Kawakami – who made a splash as the nun with a gun, Rosette, in Chrono Crusade – breathes life with equal panache into the character of Fuyuki Hinata.

“Overall, it’s not only a parody or a matter of great seiyuu, but a good story,” says Hosono, the otaku fan who also says he prefers Jōji Nakata in the Giroro role.

“Even if you don’t know the original manga you can enjoy what happens in the anime series. I think Keroro has charm enough for all ages.”



Copyright All rights reserved. Sunrise/KADOKAWA PUBLISHING CO.,LTD.

Tokyo Big Sight & Odaiba

Located in Koto-Ku on land reclaimed from Tokyo Bay, situated right next to the Odaiba area and Rainbow Bridge - ostensibly one of Tokyo’s most famous romantic viewing points - is the Tokyo International Exhibition Center, a massive structure more lovingly referred to by locals as "Tokyo Big Sight".

Officially, it’s Japan's largest exhibition and convention center.

But more importantly it’s also the place where all the major anime companies flaunt their new celluloid wonders every March at the Tokyo International Anime Fair (TAF), and the hallowed halls where Tokyo’s Comic Market (Comiket) rams together around 200,000 people including a fair portion of cosplayers and one helluva lot of manga, for the largest comic convention in the world.


The next of these is due to begin unfurling itself in just eight days, on December 29th.

Constructed by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, Tokyo Big Sight opened its doors in 1996, and since then has welcomed more than 10 million visitors annually for the past several years, with the cumulative visitor count topping 100 million in July 2007, to an area measuring 230,873.07 square meters of floor space.

The building varies in height between three and eight stories, and has a cavernous underground parking annex that rather inanely draws to mind the Who song 'I Can See For Miles'.

The Centre itself is composed of three main areas: the West Hall, the East Hall and the high-tech Conference Tower. The main exhibition halls are located in the West Hall and the East Hall, and there are huge works of art interspersed throughout the center by artists like Hidetoshi Nagasawa, Michael Craig-Martin, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje Van Bruggen.

But there’s a wee bit more to Odaiba than just Tokyo Big Sight.

While historically-speaking this area has a bit of a mundane past (the name “Odaiba” itself harks back to a string of six island fortresses built way back in 1853 in order to protect Edo - old Tokyo - from attack by sea), the area is considered the romantic hot spot of this 12-million-person metropolis, and it’s no real wonder why when you consider the scenic bay views and the somewhat picturesque Rainbow Bridge.

There are a multitude of all-inclusive, theme park like shopping malls such as Venus Fort, some superbly innovative architecture - the stand-outs are Fuji TV studio’s spherical building designed by Kenzo Tange, and the Museum of Maritime Science - and literally hundreds of restaurants, cafes, shops, and nightclubs.


There’s even a 115-metre-tall ferris wheel which used to be the biggest in the world, but is now ranked at #12.

At one time or another over the past few years, Odaiba has also played host to temporary installations like the superb portable museum entirely constructed of Cosco shipping crates, and the 18-metre, 35-ton RX-78-2 Gundam statue.

In summer, thousands flock to Odaiba for the local hanabi (fireworks) festival, and it’s standing room only - which is an issue in an earthquake-prone country like Japan.

As mentioned above, Odaiba is an artificial island built on reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay. Rumour has it that should the next big one hit this city with anywhere near the strength of the last big shaker in 1923, Odaiba will be the first place to sink beneath the waves.

It’s one reason I always pack a flotation device when I go visit.

Gundam Statue Terrorizes Tokyo

This baby knocked our socks off today, although calling it a 'baby' is a wee bit of a misnomer, since the brand new, iconic RX-78-2 Gundam statue at Odaiba's Shiokaze Park here in Tokyo - still under construction, but almost ready to be unveiled in July 2009 - towers over innocent, earthbound bystanders at around 18 meters.

It also weighs in at 35 tons, so close proximity in this earthquake-prone country may not be so advisable. What the statue does do is make the nearby copy of the Statue of Liberty look, well, tired and matronly by comparison. Not to mention insignificant.

The full-scale Gundam figure is being put together to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the first broadcast of the rather spiffy mecha anime TV series, Mobile Suit Gundam.



Our lumbering suit of futuristic combat armour also exudes mist from various points in his body, and is apparently going to look a treat in the evenings with some special lighting. Personally, I was gob-smacked; this is just plain brilliant.

Word has it that other people can train-spot this baby for free up until the end of August - whereupon it'll be torn down, sad to say.