Doraemon: Robot War (partially found bootleg anime film; 1983)
Doraemon as seen in the movie. Note the aforementioned English and Traditional Chinese subtitles.
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 in February 12, 1983, but it sold poorly and was not released on home video.
Plot
The plot of the film centers around a Robotics Exhibition in Taiwan where they are voting for the world's best robot. One professor who is really committed to developing the world's best robot had his spotlight suddenly stolen from him when Doraemon and Nobita entered the competition. Having been accidentally coerced into the competition, Doraemon used a wide variety of gadgets to defeat his opponents and ended up winning the World's Most Excellent Robot award.
The professor is so frustrated by this that he begins to develop an evil robot to defeat Doraemon. Meanwhile, Doraemon became a household name overnight and is now a big star. Wanting to become a star and experience the spotlight as well, Nobita uses a gadget to disguise himself as Doraemon.
The result of this is that Nobita, disguised as Doraemon, ends up being abducted by the professor's evil robot. Once he learns of this, Doraemon immediately sets out to rescue Nobita. Meanwhile, the professor sends out an army of robots to carry out terrorist attacks all around the world.
Eventually, Doraemon saves Nobita and manages to learn the weakness of the professor's robots, a fear of a certain type of gemstone. With this knowledge, Nobita and his friends are able to set out on an adventure, find the gemstone, and save the world.
Wang Film Productions
Wang Film Productions is an overseas animation outlet, orginally created by James Wang for Hannah Barbera. It has worked for, among lesser-known studios, Hannah-Barbera/Cartoon Network (Regular Show: The Movie, Jetsons: the Movie, numerous Scooby-Doo specials), and Disney (Tron, The 7D, Phineas and Ferb movies, Goof Troop), as well as 3 episodes of Ren and Stimpy and 30 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.
Availability
Information on the film is extremely scarce, and the only proof of its existence is the few Chinese sites, containing several screenshots and one clip of ending footage from the film which was posted on Facebook in 2012.
All footage of the film has English and Traditional Chinese subtitles - it is unknown why this was included in the release.
Lead No 1. Msun Chang
After speaking with Msun (the person who wrote the blog which hosted the existing images and posted a 30-second clip on Facebook), the reason he hasn't uploaded anything else from the movie and refuses to do so is apparently due to people "stealing" his videos and uploading them to YouTube, in combination to an incident when he first uploaded it where he was the only one to recieve a takedown, apparently by Doraemon`s original Company, which means this may actually be official, or at least officially recognized as a Doraemon film.
Honestly, I (VGDCMario) emphasize with msun's plight; you'd get pretty frustrated too if you uploaded a video, copyright infringement or not, and someone got all the credit for the video while all you got was the lawsuit.
Gallery
References
- http://blog.roodo.com/msun/archives/21020918.html
- http://pastebin.com/Z93DWKzA English translations of existing information from the Chinese sites.
- http://blog.roodo.com/msun/archives/21020918.html Untranslated archive of the original post showing the images.
- http://talk.doracity.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&p=138588&sid=9c870aedf59fe8ffc4a15e47d80353ff Post on doracity with more newspaper clippings on the film.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Film_Productions *http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/WangFilmProductions Info on the studio behind the film.
- https://www.facebook.com/304841462877244/videos/256449697808764/ Ending Clip of the movie.