Doraemon: Robot War (partially found bootleg anime film; 1983)

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DoraemonRobotWars Taiwanese.png

Doraemon as seen in the movie.

Status: Partially Found

Doraemon: Robot War (小叮噹大戰機器人) is a 1983 bootleg Doraemon film created by Cuckoo's Nest Studio (now known as Wang Film Productions). The film was directed by Wang Ya Quan. The film was released in theaters on February 12th, 1983, but it did poorly at the box office and was never released on home video.

Plot

A robotics exhibition is held in Taiwan, where attendees vote to decide the world's best robot. Doraemon and Nobita enter the competition. Having been accidentally coerced into the competition, Doraemon uses a wide variety of gadgets to defeat his opponents and wins the World's Most Excellent Robot award.

One professor becomes jealous of Doraemon's success and begins to develop an evil robot to destroy Doraemon. Meanwhile, Doraemon becomes a famous household name overnight. Nobita, wanting some time in the spotlight for himself, uses a gadget to disguise himself as Doraemon.

As a result, Nobita is abducted by the evil professor's robot while disguised as Doraemon. Doraemon immediately sets out to rescue Nobita, while the evil professor deploys an army of robots to carry out terrorist attacks around the world.

Eventually, Doraemon saves Nobita and learns that the evil professor's robots are afraid of a certain type of gemstone. Nobita and friends embark on an adventure to find the gemstone and save the world.

Wang Film Productions

Wang Film Productions is an overseas animation outlet, originally created by James Wang for Hanna-Barbera. It has worked for, among lesser-known studios, Hanna-Barbera/Cartoon Network (Jetsons: The Movie, numerous Scooby-Doo specials), and Disney (Tron, The 7D, Phineas and Ferb movies, Goof Troop), as well as three episodes of Ren and Stimpy and thirty episodes of Tiny Toon Adventures.

Unlike more amateurish companies such as Regal Studios or Wolf Tracer Studios, this is a "legitimate" production house that does legitimate animation work, which makes the fact that they made an unauthorized Doraemon film even stranger. The studio's current whereabouts remain unknown.

Leads

No. 1: Msun Chang

Msun Chang, who wrote the blog that hosted the existing images and posted a 30-second clip on Facebook, has not uploaded anything else, claiming that his videos were being "stolen" and reuploaded to YouTube. Msun also noted that, when he first uploaded the clip, he was the only one to receive a takedown — apparently by Doraemon's original publisher — which means the movie may be official or at least acknowledged by said publisher.

No. 2: Pirated bootleg

Msun claimed his father bought his copy of the film at a DVD store, and that pirated recordings of movies were popular in early 1980s Taiwan. If there is any chance of finding another copy, someone would have to know their way around Taiwan's pirate VHS shops or know someone else that does.

Availability

Information on the film is extremely scarce, and the only proof of its existence is in a few Chinese websites, containing several screenshots and one clip of ending footage from the film, that was posted on Facebook sometime in 2012.

Gallery

A clip of the film.

See also

References