Doraemon the Movie 2019: Chronicle of the Moon Exploration

A solid original film (non-remake) that did a decent job with using one of my favorite manga episodes for its premise. The storyline is extremely simple, and overall conflict is easy to understand. This film would likely be extremely entertaining for kids. But as an adult watching this, I did find areas where the movie could have been improved. As with many of the recent original Doraemon films, the guest characters feel very shallow. We don't get to learn much about their personalities. I'm most confused with Luca's character, as his feelings towards his parents feel very inconsistent. I wasalso pretty confused with the whole "my parents created us" idea, which was never fleshed out so we just have to take that fact at face value. The movie again also relied heavily on convenient character settings, like Mozo's physical characteristics that were only used in critical scenes in the climax. Having AI robots in the Kaguya planet also made the build up towards the climax feel really cheap. Goddard's voice actor was horrible - sounded like a cheap text-to-speech robot himself! Finally, the use of the 1,000 year gap in time between Luca's parents and the movie's present setting felt unnatural. I know parts of it was important for how the ending was put together and how they wanted to relate the whole film to the traditional Japanese folktale about Princess Kaguya, but Luca's group really didn't need to be 1,000 years old. Although there were some glaring issues with the film that, as an adult viewer, made the film feel unnatural at times, the overall story and its main conflicts are simple enough that your kids will have a blast watching this. The bunnies are adorable, and Dai Hirai's ending theme was well-written too. (edit: I was sleepy writing this - I don't make a lot of sense here.... might rewrite sometime later)