Doraemon the Movie: Nobita's Earth Symphony (映画ドラえもん: のび太の地球交響楽, Eiga Doraemon: Nobita no chikyū shinfonī) is a 2024 Japanese animatedmusicalfantasyscience fictionadventure film. It is the 43rd Doraemon feature film, based off the series created by Fujiko F. Fujio. Directed by Kazuaki Imai with a screenplay by Teruko Utsumi, it was released theatrically in Japan on March 1, 2024.[2]
Plot
A long time ago, a young Cro-Magnon boy was listening to the beautiful calls of swans. Then a glowing flying object falls into the forest, and a sleeping baby emerges from the object.
In the present day, Nobita's class is practicing “Swan Etude,” a recorder performance piece, in the music room of the elementary school in preparation for the autumn concert. However, Nobita, who is not very good at playing the recorder, is laughed at by his classmates for playing the “no” note, which is not in the “Do Re Mi” scale.
Nobita returns home at a loss, but he learns that Doraemon used a secret tool called “diary in advance” and gave him his favorite food, dorayaki. He plans to use the diary to get rid of music class at school so that he will not have to practice the recorder, and writes in his diary, which he has replaced with his own: “Today, there was no music. It was fun.”
The next day, July 17, Nobita is happy that music class has been canceled, but Doraemon notices the diary substitution and informs him that “not only music class, but music itself has disappeared from the world." Nobita takes a nonchalant attitude, saying, “It doesn't matter.” However, chaos breaks out in the town, and people gradually start to become irritated. Witnessing this, Nobita cries out to Doraemon, and the situation was resolved by cutting the pages of his diary to shreds. Meanwhile, at the ISAS, a black creature sprouts from the rocks and sand brought back by the probe. The creature begins to move, splitting up.
In the evening, Nobita, who was practicing his recorder on the riverbank, meets a mysterious girl. Nobita is impressed by her beautiful singing voice, but when he realizes, the girl had disappeared. As Nobita looks around, a small particle of light dances in the wind.
The next day, Nobita was practicing the recorder with Shizuka, Gian, and Suneo at the riverbank. Doraemon comes to check on them, Nobita and his toys with “Robotter” attached, and the “Mood-Pumping Band” join them, and a fun concert begins. Nobita and his friends are very excited after the performance, but once again the girl disappears before they know it.
Later that evening, Nobita and his friends receive a mysterious letter saying, “We are waiting for you tonight in the school music room,” and are led through the door of the music preparation room to a place called “Fare's Hall of Fame. There, they met a mysterious girl named Micka, who had been appearing frequently, and a robot named Chapek, who was taking care of Micka. Micka and her friends, who hail from the planet Mushka, had summoned Nobita and his friends as virtuosos, masters of “Fare (music),” in order to revive the “Fare Hall of Fame,” which was dormant due to lack of energy. At first, the group is perplexed, but seeing the purity of Mikka, they decide to cooperate. Using Doraemon's secret tool “Red Thread of Fate” to select instruments to play, Gian pulls the tuba, Suneo the violin, Shizuka the bongo, and Nobita the recorder, and they become partners with the instruments selected by the “Musician's License,” and the group runs outside to revive the hall of fame.
After meeting the musician robots, Mozzel and Batch, in the dried-up “harp river,” the group plays their instruments toward the “furre ore” to generate “furre energy” and successfully channel water into the canal. In the restored “Soundworm Forest,” Takiren, another musician robot, is weeping with grief over the loss of his “master,” and he heals her heart with a sad performance that is close to his heart. In the forest, there are many grave markers, which are the graves of the deceased “Lords,” the Mushikas. Takiren, the gravedigger, tells the surprised group that the planet Mushka was destroyed by a great calamity long ago, that the Hall of Fame was a lifeboat with only a few Mushkas and robots, and that Mishka is now the only surviving Mushka in the Hall of Fame. Chapek had kept all of this a secret in order not to hurt Micka. Nobita and his friends are touched by Micka and move on with her.
In the town, the sleeping robots awaken. The group plays Fare with the awakened robots, and the Hall of Fame is restored to life. Suneo and Gian find a black creature and follow it into the Fare Factory. Robot Worker, the conductor of the Fahle factory, takes Suneo and Gian as intruders and knocks them down to the basement. There, they find a mass of black creatures. Under Workner's direction, Gian and Suneo try to exterminate the creatures by playing Fare, but Fare is ineffective against the combined giant creatures, and Workner is also attacked. Nobita and his friends join Gian and Suneo, who have escaped with their lives, and return to Earth.
After the closing ceremony of elementary school, Nobita wraps up his “Hustle Nejimaki” and hurries to finish his summer vacation homework in order to go to the Hall of Fame, and practices the recorder in the bathroom in the middle of the night. Doraemon listens to his recorder playing and falls asleep. A black creature enters his bed.
The next day, Doraemon feels a strange feeling in his throat, but he heads for the Hall of Fame with Nobita and his friends via the “Dokodemo Door”. Nobita forgets his recorder and uses the “Space-Time Changer” to temporarily change time and space to retrieve it, but the group arrives at the temple, the center of the Hall of Fame. There, they found Ventoux, Chapek's teacher and maestro (conductor). He tells Nobita and the others that private performances of fares were forbidden in Musica, and that they attracted a giant cosmic life form called “Noise,” which was destroyed. He also tells them that Doraemon, who has been acting strangely, sees that he has been invaded by Noise spores and that the main body of Noise is approaching the earth. While Nobita used his “diary in advance” and the earth became a “world where music has disappeared,” the spores of the noise, which were mixed in with the materials recovered by the ISAS probe, have been secretly active and multiplying on the earth where the weak point, the furre, doesn’t exist, and one of these spores entered Doraemon's mouth while he was sleeping, causing an abnormality. One of the spores had entered Doraemon's mouth while he was sleeping, causing an abnormality.
In order to defeat the noise, the Hall of Fame must be completely restored. Its main switch had to be the whistle of Mushka. It had been given to Mushka's twin sister, who had been sent to Earth 40,000 years ago. While wondering where the flute is now, Shizuka learned in music class that “the world's oldest musical instrument” is a flute made of swan bones. It is in the Ueno Museum.
He finds a “swan bone flute” in the Ueno museum and checks it out with “omoidekoron,” but it is not a musica flute. While he is troubled again, Suneo realizes that the song of the diva Meena resembles Mushka's lullaby, and Mikka visits Meena, who was in Japan on a world tour. Meena tells him that the flute is a “good-luck charm given to her by her grandmother,” but he readily agrees as “a request from a fan,” and lends the flute to her. Meena is a descendant of Mikka's sister's blood.
Moments later, Doraemon is invaded by noise spores and finally stops functioning. Nobita and his friends perform in a vacant lot in order to cure Doraemon, but the harmony is disturbed and things don't go well, as each person plays as they please. Finally, Gian and Suneo blame Nobita for the malfunction, and Shizuka blames him for it, which causes disquiet. Gian tries to stop Nobita from performing, but Nobita says, “I want to heal Doraemon, too! I want to play with everyone! and desperately continues to play the recorder. Shizuka and the others, seeing this, regain their composure and play along with Nobita, and Mikka also starts to sing. Noise spores eventually fly out of his mouth, and Doraemon returns to normal and hurries to the Hall of Fame with Nobita and the others.
The group returns to the hall, but the flute that Mina left with Micka is missing a part and one note. Noise appears and attacks Micka and Nobita. Nobita desperately tries to blow, but the “Do” sound becomes a “No” sound, but somehow the Hall of Fame is restored. The “last note” needed to revive the Hall of Fame is the “no” that Nobita blows on his recorder.
In order to repel the noise that is trying to head toward the earth, Nobita, together with Micka, Vento, and other Fare musicians, play “Earth Symphony,” which was composed by Chapek based on his experience of listening to a lot of music on the earth. At first, it seemed that they were able to weaken the noise and get rid of it, but it quickly resurfaced and sent Nobita and his friends flying into outer space. It was a completely silent world with no air.
But then, they began to hear the farce played by the toys. Nobita and his friends play in space again and succeed in fighting off the noise. Doraemon wonders why the sound was heard in outer space, but then the “Space-Time Changer” falls. The “space-time changer” was triggered by the random tossing out of secret tools and junk in an attempt to fight the noise, and “coincidentally” the place where it was replaced was the bathroom where Nobita went to retrieve a recorder he had forgotten last night at midnight. Moreover, the size of the space was also adjusted incorrectly, so that the surrounding space, including the Earth, was floating in the bathtub. These events were caused by the “diary” that Nobita wrote in his “Hustle Nejimaki” when he was completing his summer vacation homework, thinking that it was his own diary. The contents of the diary were: “Today, we all took a bath together. It was fun.”
Later, Micka leaves the earth with Tendo. Chapek rushes to her as she gazes forlornly into space, thinking of her departed friend. The furre she played with Nobita and the others to fight off the noise triggered a signal from another ship that had escaped Mushka. Micka is happy to have a friend in Musiqa, and expresses her gratitude to “Nobita's big brother” instead of “Nobihon Megane” on Earth.
Meanwhile, the summer vacation is over on September 13. The elementary school was holding an autumn music concert. The children's performance of “Swan Etude” ends with Nobita's “No” note. Then, from the window of the music room, particles of phare energy soared into the sky. They were shaped like an extremely unusual “no”.
Kazuaki Imai stated that he got the idea for the story of the film during the lockdown period of the COVID-19 pandemic. He said, "When I finished directing my previous work "New Dinosaur," the world had changed in an unexpected way due to the pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus. Children were more stressed when the human nature of direct contact and interaction was restricted. One day, I felt emotional when I saw my son, who was stuck at home, singing loudly while watching TV. It was a programme that connected each performer remotely and performed one song while the concert could not be held. At the same time as I was struck by the power of music, the image of children going on a big adventure in the world of music with Doraemon began to swell in my head."[5][6]
Reception
Box Office
At the box office, Doraemon the Movie: Nobita's Earth Symphony made $4,366,266[7] on its opening day and grossed $31,365,025[7] worldwide.