Doraemon

Doraemon is a blue robotic cat from the twenty-second century, sent back in time to help a hapless schoolboy named Nobita Nobi avoid a future of failure and debt. Created by the manga duo Fujiko Fujio in 1969, he has become one of the most beloved characters in Japan and across much of Asia, with a manga run of tens of millions of copies, a long-running television anime and dozens of feature films.

The formula is beautifully simple. Nobita gets into trouble; Doraemon reaches into the four-dimensional pouch on his stomach and produces a gadget to solve it; Nobita misuses the gadget spectacularly; a lesson is learned. Some of those gadgets have entered the language — the Anywhere Door, which opens onto any location; the Take-copter, a small propeller worn on the head; the Time Machine hidden in a desk drawer.

His design has an origin story of its own. Doraemon was originally yellow and had ears, until a robot mouse gnawed them off; he wept so bitterly at the loss that his colour drained away to blue. The result is a lasting phobia of mice, which is a persistent comic weakness for a character who is nominally a cat. His other great appetite is for dorayaki, the red-bean pancake, which will reliably distract him from any crisis.

Doraemon's cultural footprint in Japan is hard to overstate. In 2008 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs named him Japan's first 'anime ambassador', formally appointing a fictional robot cat to represent the country's culture abroad.