
01
As one of Japan's national manga series, the Doraemon series began serialization in 1969, and the story of the short story series is a combination of fragments of Nobita's daily life, basically following the pattern of "Nobita encounters a problem", "New props appear" - "Solve the problem / Worse situation appears". It is worth noting that no matter how bizarre props appear in the story, the stage of the story will never be separated from the background of daily life. These story segments are relatively independent, the logical connection between the units is not very close, as long as you understand the basic settings of the characters and the story, there is no requirement to read in a specific order, even if you choose a random chapter to enter, it will not hinder the understanding.
Eleven years later, author Fujiko F. Fujio initiated a new form of creation. Beginning in 1980, as the original for theatrical version of the film, the author created a full-length manga every other year and serialized it in the monthly korokoro manga before the film's release. Unlike short stories, long series are contiguous adventure stories. However, the prototype of a long story comes from a short story. The first story in the long-form series was Nobita's Dinosaur, a predecessor to the author's short story of the same name, created in 1975. In 1979, a film production project based on the short story was launched, so the author expanded on the original, so that the story did not stop at the scene where Nobita sent the dinosaur "Pippi", but added the protagonist's adventure story of traveling to the Cretaceous era and defeating the dinosaur hunters from the future.
Nobita's Dinosaur Movie (1980 edition)
Nobita's Dinosaur Movie (2006 edition)
The feature-length series continues to this day, still maintaining the progress of one theatrical version per year. As of 2019, Doraemon's theatrical version of the movie has been released 39 times. Before the author's death, except for the author's "Nobita's Parallel Journey to the West" in 1988, which the author did not participate in due to illness, the remaining seventeen were created by the author himself.
In the long-form series, the most common is the mode of juvenile comics: teenagers are united, hitting stones with pebbles, and occasionally assisted by external forces such as the Time patrol, with courage against evil forces. Therefore, the image set in the daily life of the short story has also been broken, the cowardly and timid Nobita can be brave and fearless, the violent and selfish fat tiger will be full of righteousness, the snobbish and arrogant little husband will become witty, and the goddess Shizuka of Wenjing will become the goddess of war.
For us in the boring summer vacation, they can go to the other world to seek thrill adventures, which makes young readers envious. So we followed Wu Xiaoqiang to escape from the school, open space, and houshan, which are not uncommon scenes, back to the Cretaceous era when dinosaurs were active, exploring mysterious alien planets, and going deep into the ghost rock city under the sea... These experiences are the spice of their immutable lives and the satisfaction of the teenage reader's thirst for adventure.
"Nobita's Great Demon Realm", "Nobita's History of Cosmic Exploration", "Nobita's Dinosaurs"
The Doraemon series is aimed at children and teenagers, and its story theme is not far from the comic works serialized at the same time, and it is mainly light, funny or adventurous. Since the 1970s, different kinds of manga in Japan have been targeted at readers, such as the Elementary School Library Learning Magazine and korokoro manga serialized in the Doraemon series, which are specially aimed at preschoolers or elementary school students, so the younger age of the story is inevitable.
But in the long-form series, there is an outlier, a story of an author with "bootlegs".
That's Nobita's Creation Diary.
02
Fujiko F. Fujio began writing Nobita's Creation Diary in 1994 and serialized it in monthly korokoro manga from September 1994 to March 1995, with a theatrical version of the same name released on March 4, 1995. It is the fifteenth book in the large-length manga series and the sixteenth book in the theatrical series.
Nobita's Genesis Diary film (1995)
Different from the setting of "Young Heroes Fighting Evil Forces", "Nobita's Creation Diary" is unique in terms of theme and world view setting.
The beginning of the work is similar to other stories: as summer vacation draws to a close, Nobita is troubled by the delay in writing a research diary, and weeps and complains about the ancestors of mankind, Adam and Eve, who stole the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden despite God's advice, and were eventually expelled from the Garden of Eden by an angry God, causing his descendants to suffer for generations because of their sins—yes, otherwise Nobita would not have to write his homework. In addition to being very much in line with his personality, Nobita's unreasonable brain circuit also hints at the heart of the story: Is the fate of humanity in the hands of incredible forces?
In order to complete the homework, with the help of Doraemon and magical props, Nobita and his friends created a earth and followed up to observe the birth and development of the new earth.
The whole story is divided into two narrative lines: light and dark. The Bright Line is Nobita's line of followers of Taio, who looks similar to him and has a similar personality, observing the changes of his ancestors while using magical props to help them solve problems at the right time. They are as weak as Nobita, but they are very kind and willing to help others, and finally the good people have good rewards, and The taixiong, who was originally weak and scum of war, also has the descendants of Nomihide, an entrepreneur who has made great contributions to society.
The author uses this line to explain the historical development of Japanese society from the Stone Age to the Meiji Era, and also summarizes the global history of human civilization from slash-and-burn cultivation to enlightenment and enlightenment.
In addition, the dark line is that the strange mantis man descended on Earth and abducted the fat tiger and the little man who were lazy and did not work on the island for a vacation, thus leading to another creature: the insect man born on the New Earth, far more civilized than the human world.
In the early days of the Formation of the New Earth, it was filled only with insects. Eager to see the birth of mammals, Doraemon uses the evolution lamp to promote the evolution of fish into amphibians, but inadvertently illuminates insects. With the advent of mammals, the living environment of insects was threatened and had to retreat to the underground to live. Thus, the humans on the ground and the insectoids on the ground form two very different worlds. This phenomenon is called "God's prank" by insect people.
No wonder the official self-complained: Nobita has created a world that is so strange.
03
The most prominent point of Nobita's Creation Diary is that there is no absolute evil force. Although there is a relationship between the "ground humans" and the "underground insect people", unlike other stories, there is no absolute evil person in this game - the insect people want to attack humans because they want to retake the ground world, and the humans represented by Nomishu bravely resist.
At first glance, the unarmed Nomi Hideo was the victim, and the insect man was undoubtedly the evil force. However, it is worth noting that this struggle exists on the New Earth and does not endanger the safety of the nobido who are the protagonists. In story comics, the protagonist is the reader's projection in the comic book world, and the reader defaults to following the protagonist's perspective to obtain information and feel empathy. So in this story, like Nobita, we take it from a third-party standpoint and defuse the disaster with the "hand of God" at the last moment.
Nobita created another earth for the insect people.
The protagonist's "God" identity is another highlight of this work. They are the Creator Gods, the Goddesses who created man, and the absolute beings who can determine the fate of mankind on the New Earth. The same children's literature that thinks about the origin of the universe is different from "Sophie's World" in which Sophie is played by the colonel's words, in which the young reader has enough addiction to being a god through the perspective of Nobita and others. However, what is intriguing is the author's hint to the young reader here that we have become a Creator once, so is there a Creator in the world?
Who am I? Where am I from?
All kinds of thinking about existentialism are clichés. Exploring the origin is the nature of human beings since ancient times, and Plato in the Republic uses the prisoner of the cave as a metaphor for human beings, who can only rely on the projection on the cave wall to speculate on the face of truth - we want to know too much, but we have very limited access. So cultures have created their own creation myths that explain how mysterious forces shape the fate of mankind, but this is nothing more than a reasonable story of human beings making up their own existence.
In fujiko F. Fujio's other works such as Heterochromatic Short Stories, SF Short Story Collection, and Middle-Aged Superman Saeganai, we can glimpse his ambition to express serious themes, while the Doraemon series is a children's manga for young readers, with its own limitations, and there are many themes that cannot be covered.
The Time Patrol deals with the history of torturing and hunting "witches" in the Middle Ages
However, the author is not dead-hearted, collecting a large amount of information to depict the origin process of all things from chaotic and nihilistic space to the big bang of the universe to the formation of life, and integrates elements such as religion and history, and explains the issue of creator and created in a limited children's comic, which undoubtedly opens a new window for thoughtful young readers.
*The pictures are from the Internet, invaded and deleted.