Don't let the giant golden monster on the poster fool you. He's honestly not in this one much.
Doraemon and friends in a Planet of Living Toys.
Doraemon: Nobita and the Spiral City is a 1997 anime film, the seventeenth in the Doraemon Film Series, based on the installment of Doraemon's Long Tales of the same name.
A raffle draw from the future have Doraemon winning a planet, which turns out to be populated entirely by sentient, living toys. Nobita and friends - and their toys - are invited to stay in the planet as well, where thanks to an artifact called the Life Key, they can bring their toys to life much like the planet's inhabitants. But trouble follows when Onigoro Kumatora, an escaped criminal wanted by the police, somehow finds Doraemon's Anywhere Door and ends up in the planet of toys.
Known by fans as the most light-hearted and kid-friendly entry in the entirety of the "Long Tales" series. Also remembered as one of Fujio F. Fujiko's last works before his passing, with the film adaptation being released posthumously.
Doraemon: Nobita and the Spiral City contain examples of:
- Adaptational Badass: Gian's toy kaiju Goji-chan is quickly taken down by Onigoro and his clones in the manga when they realize he's not as ferocious as he looks. In the anime, he holds them off until Nobita comes to his aid with the inflatable gun.
- Animate Inanimate Object: Alongside the Living Toys of Spiral City, the story also features a Colonel Sanders Statue, a lab skeleton, a Manniken Piss replica and an election poster getting animated by the Life Key. They even shows up defending the city from Onigoro and his minions in the final battle!
- Because You Were Nice to Me: Once again, Shizuka's kindness saves the day as after Onigoro took over the spaceship with his underlings, assigning Hokuro as the guard while his mooks gets to party. Shizuka is the only person to treat Hokuro like a decent human being, bringing him food from the party and telling him there's more if he needs any. When Onigoro decides to blow the entire station up and had his minions tie up Doraemon and gang, Hokuro who's assigned to tie up Shizuka leaves a few knots loose on purpose, allowing Shizuka to escape and set Doraemon and the others free.
- Bizarre Gambling Winnings: Early in the adventure, Doraemon partakes in a futuristic lottery where the prizes are planets. Nobita sounds delighted, until Doraemon reveals most of the prizes are random scrap planets from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, which are too small, polluted, fragile, or otherwise uninhabitable.
- Breather Episode: An installment set in a world of Living Toys, with the main villain being an ordinary human, following the relatively dark and gritty Doraemon: Nobita and the Galaxy Super-express can only be this.
- Butt-Monkey: The unique clone of Onigoro named Hokuru really doesn't have the best of luck compared to his fellow clones. From getting scared by Gian's Godzilla-knockoff toy Goji-chan, getting repeatedly pushed around by the original Onigoro, to being assigned to carry a heavy fireman's ladder by his boss, much to his dismay.
- Call-Back: Nobita gets to use the inflatable bullets gun in this adventure, a souvenir he collected from Doraemon: Nobita and the Galaxy Super-express (one movie ago) to take on Onigoro and his clones.
- Catapult to Glory: One that happens unintentionally – the final battle had Doraemon enlarging toys for the Spiral City's denizens to use, including a slingshot and tennis balls as large as a person for Gian to sling at. Halfway through, Gian accidentally slips and slingshots himself on a bunch of Onigoro clones knocking them all out.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: When the Sower, in the form of a gigantic, rampaging golden giant, fights anything. There's literally nothing that can stop him or even slow him down!
- Dem Bones: When Wooky goes crazy bringing random stuff in Tokyo to life with the Life Key, one of the things he revives is a laboratory skeleton. Said skeleton managed to scare the bejesus out of Hokuro in the final battle.
- Denser and Wackier: You can't avoid this trope when the story is set in a world of sentient toys, the villains being a bunch of inept human criminals, and the villains getting defeated by being peed on by a thirty-foot Manneken Pis.
- Distinguishing Mark: What makes Hokuro (the token good side of Onigoro) distinct from the other Onigoro clones, being the gigantic mole on his upper lip. Some dubs even identify Hokuro as "Big mole"!
- Don't Look Down: Said word-for-word by Onigoro when making his minions cross an impromptu bridge made from a stolen fireman's ladder, over a bottonless fissure. Later on repeated verbatim when Doraemon and gang gets chased by Onigoro and his clones. "Keep running and don't look down!"
- Excrement Statement: One which ends up saving the day – when Onigoro decide to set the entire forest alight in revenge towards the toys, suddenly comes the rain… which turns out to be the living Manneken Piss replica statue, who then urinates all over the burning forest and drenching Onigoro and his clones, literally washing all the villains into a corner with his pee.
- A Form You Are Comfortable With: The Sower, while communicating with Nobita (after rescuing him from falling down a deep chasm), assumes the appearance of a boy Nobita's age when revealing the true backstory behind the Spiral City being a world created by the Sower himself. When Nobita comments that the Sower "doesn't look that intimidating the Sower then retaliates by turning into Tamako Nobi.The Sower: NOBITA! DO YOUR HOMEWORK!... Ah, I can see that you're afraid of your mother.
- Furry Confusion: One which is largely justified. Some of the animal-based toys of the Spiral City behaves like animals, while some of them like Pibu and Popi the toy pigs, Ain Motain the stuffed cow and Thomas Meedison the sheep can speak perfect human language. This is largely due to the Sower bestowing them intelligence by striking the Egg Factory with his lightning.
- Heel–Face Brainwashing: A variant – the story ends with Onigoro and all his clones – including the benevolent one, Hokuro - captured alive by the toys and sent back to the Egg Factory so the cloning process can be reversed. Once complete, it turns out all the Onigoros have instead merged into Hokuro and have reformed into a benevolent person, who confesses he will turn himself to the authorities once he's sent back to Japan. A further news report when the gang went back to earth reveals that Hokuro-as-Onigoro is now a reformed criminal peacefully serving time in prison.
- Implacable Man: When the Sower goes on a rampage, NOTHING can slow him down. He'll just change from a rampaging giant human to a golden giant snake to a humungous rhino beetle and eventually a tank.
- Inflating Body Gag: Nobita still has the inflatable gun from his adventure in the Galaxy Super-Express, which he uses on several of Onigoro's clones in the final battle, causing them to inflate and swell, where the toy animals can then collect and string them together like clusters of balloons.
- Lighter and Softer: This is easily the lightest installment of the various entries in Doraemon's Long Tales. The fantasy land the gang find themselves in is populated entirely by toys, the villains are human criminals instead of monsters, demons or intergalactic threats, the only mildly scary opponent, the Seeker, turns out to be a benevolent god, there are tons of humor and light-hearted moments in-between, and pretty much every instance of onscreen violence is Played for Laughs ( right up to the slapstick-laden final battle, with Onigoro getting defeated by Nobita in an embarrassing, humiliating and funny way).
- Lightning Can Do Anything: Including bestowing intelligence on stuffed toy animals!
- Living Toys: Thanks to the Life Key, the natural residents of the Spiral City are all toys which are bestowed life. Gian, Suneo and Shizuka even brings several of their own toys to be added as residents of the City, including Gian's giant monster toy, Goji-chan. And then Shizuka's pet stuffed monkey, Wooky, gets a hold of the Life Key, sneaks into Tokyo, and starts getting creative with it.
- Me's a Crowd: Onigoro unintentionally creates multiple duplicates of himself after escaping from the human world into the Spiral City, and getting his hands on the Replicating Mirror. His duplicates don’t usually see eye-to-eye and tend to argue with each other, with one of them - a unique clone named Hokuro - being a more decent, benevolent Nice Guy.
- Mischief-Making Monkey: Shizuka's stuffed toy monkey, Wooky, easily the most mischievous animal toy in the Spiral City. After getting his hands on the Life Key and sneaking through the unattended Anywhere Door leading back to Tokyo, Wooky then uses the key to bring life to random things in Tokyo like a Colonel Sanders statue, a lab skeleton, a Mannekin Piss replica and an election poster, before dragging his new "friends" into crashing a public conference hosted by Ain Motain and Thomas Meedison.
- Named After Somebody Famous: The Spiral City's resident geniuses who gets put in charge with the city's development and industrial growth are a stuffed cow named Ain Motain and a goat named Thomas Meedison.
- Not Zilla: Gian brought along his toy Godzilla that he nicknames Goji-chan to the Spiral City, where it got brought to life by the Life Key as well. But Goji-chan turns out Gentle Giant who wouldn't hurt a fly, only scaring away Onigoro and his clones to save the heroes.
- Our Clones Are Different: A new gadget called the Duplication Mirror, which can create eggs of any sentient objects it reflects upon, later hatching into an identical clone (it works even on mammals!). The mirror was originally kept in the Spiral Planet's Cloning Chamber for maintaining their population of Living Toys, but it turns out said mirror works on humans as well when a criminal named Onigoro somehow made his way into the Spiral Planet from Tokyo and accidentally clones himself several times, leading to Doraemon and friends spending most of the story battling Onigoro and his clones. One of those clones, Hokuro ("Big Mole"), even develops a personality of his own, and is in fact benevolent compared to the others.
- Rummage Fail: An example that doesn't involve Doraemon doing the rummaging, for once. When Nobita realized Wooky the monkey knows where's the Anywhere Door, he tells Wooky to go back and find Doraemon's spare Fourth Dimensional Pocket. As Nobita doesn't speak monkey, he instead draws a half-circle and tells Wooky to look for something like that. Cue Wooky sneaking into Nobita's house and bringing back a HUGE knapsack containing objects shaped like half-circles he found in Nobita's house - including Nobita's underwear, a protractor, bowls, soup ladles, a watermelon slice from the fridge, a toy ship, half a baseball... and underneath all that mess, the spare Dimensional Pocket Nobita is looking for.
- Spaceship Slingshot Stunt: With Doraemon and the rest of the gang except Nobita whom had fallen into a chasm and his fate unknown gets trapped with Onigoro and his clones on a spaceship, Onigoro decides to simply blow up the space-station the ship is attached to using stolen dynamites, with Doraemon and gang locked and tied up in said spaceship. It works (though Doraemon and gang managed to escape thanks to Hokuro purposely leaving the knots on Shizuka loose) and the spaceship carrying Onigoro and all his clones gets propelled back to the Spiral City.
- Whale Egg: The Egg Factory which produces eggs that later hatches into living toys can create toys of mammals as well, including stuffed pigs, teddy bears, and even human dolls and action figures. Some of the main toy characters like Pibu and Popi the toy pigs, Ain Motain the cow and Thomas Meedison the horse in fact originates from eggs created in the Egg Factory. Justified because they are, well, toys (that doesn't follow the rules of biology anyway).
- When It Rains, It Pours: Onigoro and his remaining cronies tries setting the forest near the Spiral City's outskirts on fire in a final act of spite. But just then, rain started falling... and drops a massive deluge which rivals most waterfalls, with enough force to drench Onigoro's minions into unconsciousness. It turns out Doraemon had used the enlarging light on the living Manneken Piss statue, who begins urinating all over the fire and saving the day.
