Doraemon: Nobita's Art World Tales

Did You Know?

• The film sold 571,000 tickets in its first three days.
• It stayed at number one at the Japanese box office for the first 6 weeks until Detective Conan: One-eyed Flashback was released.
• The film's setting, the Principality of Arturia, was modeled after various parts of Italy.

Plot

In the 13th century, princess Claire models for her childhood friend Milo's painting in a stone castle on an island in a lake. Bored and angry, she enters the Lost Forest and is sucked into a hole in space-time. In the present, Nobita and his friends use the secret gadget "Entering Light" to enter paintings for drawing references. Nobita gives up and returns to his room, where he idly throws an eraser; a second space-time hole appears, sending the eraser through and dropping a painting onto his face. The painting shows a girl and a bat that changes color like a hologram. Doraemon and Nobita use the Entering Light to enter the painting. Claire stumbles onto the exit portal and emerges in modern Tokyo. Nobita's mother sees Claire wearing shoes in the house and tries to catch her, but Claire escapes. Nobita's father watches news about a painting of a lake whose blue color cannot be reproduced; a stone producing that color would be worth more than a diamond. Claire explores Tokyo, chases a butterfly, and wanders onto a construction site, where Shizuka, Gian, and Suneo rescue her. They meet Doraemon and friends and go to Suneo's house. Claire says she is from Arturia, a place unknown to the group; Suneo cannot find it in an encyclopedia. Claire recognizes the castle in the newspaper painting as her homeland. The group enters the painting again but cannot find the castle. Nobita is attacked by a red bat named Chai. They search the forest and reach the painting's edge, a sea of white. Doraemon accidentally walks into another portal and finds Arturia's castle.

Production

Yukiyo Teramoto, who had previously helmed three Doraemon films including the 2007 underworld adventure and the 2013 gadget museum mystery, took the director's chair once more. When the chance to create a movie inspired by a painting came up, Teramoto teamed up with Satoshi Itō and others to develop the plot. The core concept grew from the idea of exploring a painting's world using Doraemon's picture book sneakers gadget, and they blended in a medieval European feel, a setting rarely used in the series. Since medieval Europe offered few reference materials, the production team did something unusual for a Doraemon movie: they scouted locations overseas, touring Italy and interviewing locals. That research shaped the fictional Principality of Arturia. To ensure accuracy, Teramoto also consulted professors from Tokyo University of the Arts, paying close attention to the paints and every detail related to the artwork.