Manga |alt=Excerpt of "Doraemon" manga volume 1, where Doraemon made his first appearance by coming from the time machine, which lies in Nobita's desk drawer In December 1969, the
Doraemon manga appeared in six different children's monthly magazines published by
Shogakukan:
Yoiko,
Yōchien,
Shogaku Ichi-nensei,
Shogaku Ni-nensei,
Shogaku San-nensei, and
Shogaku Yo-nensei. The magazines were aimed at children from nursery school to fourth grade. In 1973, two other magazines,
Shogaku Go-nensei and
Shogaku Roku-nensei (aimed at fifth-grade and sixth-grade students respectively), started publishing the manga. In 1977,
CoroCoro Comic was launched as the flagship magazine of
Doraemon. Since the debut of
Doraemon in 1969, the stories have been selectively collected into forty-five volumes that were published under Shogakukan's imprint from July 31, 1974, to April 26, 1996. These volumes are collected in the Takaoka Central Library in
Toyama, Japan, where Fujio was born. Between April 25, 2005, and February 28, 2006, Shōgakukan published a series of five manga volumes under the title
Doraemon Plus (
Doraemon+), featuring short stories which did not appear in the forty-five original volumes; a sixth volume, the first volume in eight years, was published on December 1, 2014. Additionally, 119 unpublished stories were compiled into six colored-manga volumes under the title
Doraemon Kara Sakuhin-shu , published from July 17, 1999, to September 2, 2006. Between July 24, 2009, and September 25, 2012, Shogakukan published a
master works collection, consisting of twenty volumes with all 1,345 stories written by Fujio. In December 2019, on the 50th anniversary of
Doraemon, a "Volume 0" was published by Shogakukan featuring six different versions of Doraemon's first appearance. There have been two series of bilingual, Japanese and English, volumes of the manga by Shogakukan English Comics under the title
Doraemon: Gadget Cat from the Future, and two audio versions. The first series has ten volumes and the second one has six.
Chingwin Publishing Group released bilingual English-Chinese versions in Taiwan, and
Chuang Yi published Chinese-English versions in Singapore. In July 2013, Fujiko F. Fujio Pro announced that they would be collaborating with
ebook publisher
Voyager Japan and localization company
AltJapan Co., Ltd. to release an English-language version of the manga in full color digitally via the
Amazon Kindle platform in North America. Shogakukan released the first volume in November 2013; by 2016, a total of 200 volumes have been published. The Fujiko F. Fujio Pro English version incorporates a variety of changes to character names; Nobita is "Noby", Shizuka is "Sue", Suneo is "Sneech", and Gian is "Big G", while the food
dorayaki is "Yummy Bun/Fudgy Pudgy Pie". Also, by 2016, four volumes of the manga had been published in English in print by
Shogakukan Asia. Shogakukan started digital distribution of all forty-five original volumes throughout Japan from July 16, 2015.
Long Stories ''
Doraemon's Long Tales, also known as Doraemon's Long Stories'', is a manga and movie series ongoing since 1979, featuring longer and continuous narratives about the characters' adventures into various lands of science fiction and fantasy. The series consists of twenty-four tankōbon volumes published from 1983 to 2004.
Spin-offs Several spin-off manga series of
Doraemon have been made.
The Doraemons, a manga illustrated by Michiaki Tanaka based on
Doraemon, was published by Shogakukan in six
tankōbon volumes from 1996 to 2001. Between 1997 and 2003, Shogakukan also published fifteen volumes of
The Doraemons Special, created by Yukihiro Mitani and Masaru Miyazaki as a complement part of
The Doraemons, including twelve from the main series and three from the
Robot Training School Edition.
Dorabase, a
baseball-themed manga written and illustrated by Mugiwara Shintarō, is another spin-off of
Doraemon; twenty-three volumes of the manga were published by Shogakukan from April 26, 2001, to October 28, 2011.
Anime The first attempt of a
Doraemon animated series was in
1973, by
Nippon Television. After a January 1973 pilot named
Doraemon Mirai Kara Yattekuru , twenty-six episodes, each with two segments, were broadcast on Nippon TV from April 1 to September 30 of the same year. The series was directed by Mitsuo Kaminashi with a voice cast from
Aoni Production; Doraemon was voiced by
Kōsei Tomita, then later by
Masako Nozawa. Later in the series, the animation studio, Nippon TeleMovie Productions, went bankrupt, and the masters were sold off or destroyed. The series re-aired on Nippon TV and several local stations until 1979, when Shogakukan requested
Toyama Television to cease broadcasting. Some of the segments were found in the archives of
Imagica in 1995, and some others were recovered by Jun Masami in 2003.
Doraemon remained fairly exclusive in manga form until 1979 when an animation studio,
Shin-Ei Animation (now owned by
TV Asahi) produced an animated
second attempt of
Doraemon. The series debuted on TV Asahi on April 2, 1979. Ryo Motohira served as chief director from 1981, and
Tsutomu Shibayama from 1984. Eiichi Nakamura served as director of character design, while
Shunsuke Kikuchi served as composer.
Nobuyo Ōyama voiced Doraemon in the series; because of this, in
Asia, this version is sometimes referred to as the Ōyama Edition. In total, 1,787 episodes were produced and released in
VHS and
DVD by
Toho. On April 15, 2005,
a major renewal premiered; it includes the replacement of
voice actors and staff, and updated character designs. The third series is sometimes referred to in Asia as the Mizuta Edition, as a tribute for the voice actress for Doraemon,
Wasabi Mizuta. In May 2014, TV Asahi Corporation announced an agreement with
The Walt Disney Company to bring the 2005 series to the
Disney XD television channel and
Disney Channel in the United States beginning in the summer of that year. Besides using the name changes that were used in AltJapan's English adaptation of the original manga, other changes and edits had also been made to make the show more accessible to an American audience, such as Japanese text being replaced with English text on certain objects like signs and graded papers, items such as
yen notes being replaced by
US dollar bills, and the setting being changed from Japan to the United States. Initial response to the edited dub was positive. The Disney adaptation began broadcast in Japan on
Disney Channel on February 1, 2016. The broadcast offered the choice of the English dub or a newly recorded Japanese track by the Japanese cast of the 2005 series. The anime has been aired in over sixty countries worldwide. It premiered in Thailand in 1982, the Philippines in 1999, India in 2005, and Vietnam in 2010. Other Asian countries and regions that broadcast the series include China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and South Korea. The series is licensed in
EMEA regions by LUK International; it premiered in Spain in 1993 and France in 2003. It has also been distributed in South American countries, including Brazil, Colombia, and Chile. In 2017, POPS Worldwide, a Vietnamese multimedia company, collaborated with TV Asahi to release the anime series on
YouTube and other digital platforms.
Films As of 2025, there have been 44 annual feature-length
animated films produced by Shin-Ei Animation and released by Toho. The first twenty-five films are based on the 1979 anime, while the rest are based on the 2005 anime. A
3D computer-animated film,
Stand by Me Doraemon, released in Japan on August 8, 2014. Directed by
Takashi Yamazaki and Ryūichi Yagi, it combines elements from the short stories of the manga series: "All the Way from the Country of the Future", "Imprinting Egg", "Goodbye, Shizuka-chan", "Romance in Snowy Mountain", "Nobita's the Night Before a Wedding", and "Goodbye, Doraemon ..." into a new complete story, from the first time Doraemon came to Nobita's house to Doraemon bidding farewell to Nobita. The film was a box office success, grossing $183.4 million worldwide. A sequel,
Stand by Me Doraemon 2, also directed by Yamazaki and Yagi, was released on November 20, 2020.
Short films, OVA and crossover Several
Doraemon short films were produced and released between 1989 and 2004. ''
Doraemon: Nobita's the Night Before a Wedding, a film about the events related to the marriage of Nobita and Shizuka; The Day When I Was Born and Doraemon: A Grandmother's Recollections'', the films about the relationship between Nobita and his parents along with his grandmother. Other short films focus on
Dorami and
The Doraemons. In 1994, an educational
OVA was made, titled
Doraemon: Nobita to Mirai Note , where the main characters express the hope for a better Earth. The OVA was released in DVD along with the 13th issue of
Fujiko F. Fujio Wonderland magazine in September 2004. A crossover episode of
Doraemon with
AIBOU: Tokyo Detective Duo aired on TV Asahi on November 9, 2018.
Music The soundtrack of the 1973 anime series was composed by Nobuyoshi Koshibe, When the anime got a reboot in 2005, Kan Sawada was the composer of the series. There are four other opening themes, including an instrumental version of "Doraemon no Uta" performed by
Twelve Girls Band; "Hagushichao" performed by
Rimi Natsukawa; "Yume wo Kanaete Doraemon" , the opening theme broadcast from 2007 to 2018; and "Doraemon" performed by
Gen Hoshino, broadcast since October 2019. Numerous collections of theme songs of the anime series and feature films were initially available in
cassettes. Since the 1990s,
Doraemon songs have been released in CD, under the type of
singles and
compilation albums. Soundtracks of
Doraemon feature films have been released by
Nippon Columbia since 2001 in the album series .
Musical shows Doraemon has been adapted into a musical, titled . Based on the 1990
anime film
of the same name, it debuted at
Tokyo Metropolitan Art Space on September 4, 2008, running through September 14. Shoji Kokami was the director and writer, Makoto Sakamoto played Nobita and Reiko Suho as Shizuka; Jaian and Suneo were portrayed by Tomohiro Waki and Kensaku Kobayashi, respectively; Wasabi Mizuta voiced Doraemon. The musical was later revived and ran at Sunshine Theater, Tokyo from March 26 to April 2, 2017, then later in other prefectures including
Fukuoka,
Osaka,
Miyagi and
Aichi. The 2017 revival is also directed and written by Kokami, with Mizuta reprising her role;
Video games Many Japanese-only
video games based on
Doraemon have been developed. For instance, in 1983,
Bandai developed , an arcade game inspired by
Pac-Man.
Doraemon, a
NES video game made by
Hudson Soft, was released on December 12, 1986, and became one of the best-selling games of that year in Japan with over 1.15 million copies sold. On December 6, 2007,
Sega published
Doraemon Wii, the first
Doraemon video game released on
Wii. Doraemon can also be seen in
Namco's
Taiko no Tatsujin rhythm game series, such as in
Taiko no Tatsujin: Sesson de Dodon ga Don! (2017). The first Doraemon game to receive a Western release was
Doraemon Story of Seasons (2019). Card games with
Doraemon themes have also been made in several special occasions, sometimes to exploit the popularity of feature films. In 2016, a special edition of
Uno about the series' characters was released exclusively in Japan, as a result of a cooperation between
Asatsu-DK and
Mattel. In April 2025,
CTW announced , the first online browser game based on the series, on its gaming platform G123.
Merchandise In Japan, the
Doraemon merchandising rights belong to
Shogakukan-Shueisha Productions, which has produced and distributed a wide range of products under its brand, such as toys, food, stationery,
action figures, , shoes, clothing, and others. Several companies have collaborated on the creation and distribution of products on the series and its characters, including
Sanrio,
Converse,
Moleskine, and
ESP Guitars, which has made guitars decorated with
Doraemon characters; a further partnership of
Doraemon with
Uniqlo led to a line of clothing designed by
Takashi Murakami. The
Doraemon franchise has also collaborated with various Japanese brands, including Tsi Groove & Sports's
Jack Bunny!! golf apparel brand,
Unicharm's
MamiPoko diaper brand, and the video games
LINE Pop 2,
Monster Strike, and
Granblue Fantasy.
Viz Media owns the
Doraemon merchandising rights in North and Latin America, and themed
Happy Meals in a 2015 collaboration with
McDonald's. Viz Media Europe (now
Crunchyroll EMEA) manages the merchandising in Europe except Spain and Portugal; LUK International has obtained licenses in these two countries. Characters from
Doraemon have been used in advertising through specific agreements with Shogakukan. For instance, following the
Cool Japan initiative promoted by the
Japanese government,
Sharp Corporation produced a series of commercials featuring the characters of Doraemon and Nobita, which were broadcast in several
ASEAN countries. In late 2011, Shogakukan and
Toyota joined forces to create a series of live-action commercials as part of Toyota's ReBorn ad campaign, which depicted the manga's characters two decades after being grown up, where Hollywood actor
Jean Reno played Doraemon. == Reception ==