Doraemon: Nobita’s Little Star Wars (1985) was a masterpiece of late–Cold War bourgeois libertarian mythmaking: the kids of the Doraemon world join a miniature alien race in a righteous struggle for liberty from a totalitarian (aggressively Soviet-coded) regime, using Doraemon’s shrink ray to move back and forth between branded action figure size and regular size to bring about the triumphant end of history—and maybe even record a cool home movie on their consumer electronics while Mom works on obliviously in her spacious capitalist kitchen. This year’s remake, supposed to come out last year but delayed until eight days after the start of the Ukranian war, includes changes to character design and plot which just happen to echo the imagery of the wall-to-wall news coverage of the same war: blond-haired, blue-eyed children under threat from a totalitarian Asiatic aggressor, and you get to go fight alongside them, kids!—a pitch that actually resonates so powerfully with Japan’s honorary (?) whiteness complex that even the (center-right SocDem) Japanese Communist Party are leading the charge to escalate the war.

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