A Case for Digimon The Movie

0:12 [Music] welcome back siri killers to another deep dive into the files of saturday morning confidential over the last few months a lot of folks on our social media have asked for properties from the 1990s so today i'm digging into one of my favorite files the 2000 american japanese film adaptation from 20th century fox in saban entertainment digimon the movie this movie was a direct tie into the popular saturday morning franchise capitalizing on the partner monster genre made popular by the emergence of pokemon in the years before while it was the first american digimon film this film would be a combination of the three short films from the japanese television franchise first footage from 1999's

0:59 digimon adventure in 2000's digimon adventure r war game in digimon adventure 02 digimon hurricane landing slash transcendent evolution the golden digimentals what a mouthful since over 45 minutes of the three movies were cut for use in the american film on the american side the critics would consider this an original release digimon which is officially branded digimon digital monsters is a japanese franchise that encompasses virtual pets toys television manga video games movies and even trading card games the franchise centers around creatures called digimon made up of digital data and material if you will who reside in a

1:44 parallel universe to our earth called the digital world real original i know when these digimon are partnered with chosen warriors called the uh they use a digivice which makes them grow larger grow more powerful you guys get it brought into the toy market in 1997 as a quote unquote masculine counterpart to the massively successful tamagotchi franchise these ball pixel monsters were meant to be cute and look adorable even on the small digital screens but later as they developed into cards and comics and television they developed a much harder edge i mean we even have a digimon who is a literal handgun in 1999 an anime entitled digimon adventure and a video game called

2:30 digimon world were released to moderate success in its initial japanese market toy animation brought the anime to life along with bandai japan while originally meant to just be a short film as storyboards developed and as they kept growing it was decided that this had to be developed as a children's television show frocks broadcasting was responsible for the localization and dubbing and distribution to the american european and canadian markets where saban would be responsible for dubbing the first four series now like a lot of stories you've heard along the way in 2003 the walt disney company would acquire digimon as part of a mass buyout of their fox family um you know things like digimon they didn't particularly

3:16 care about much like power rangers and a lot of their other saturday morning lineup but again they saw a successful franchise so in its third season digimon tamers they would begin broadcasting on disney owned channels instead of just fox ones so like abc family disney xd jedex those kinds of things the digimon movie in america is a weird subsection of the first two television series of digimon digimon adventure simply known as digimon digital monster in america followed the story of 8 kids who experienced a weird snowstorm at summer camp and get pulled into the mysterious digital world where they meet these monsters called digimon who are their partner digimon and they acquire powerful devices called digivices that help their digimon digivolve and as the

4:03 lyrics of the theme song say save the digital world the american series kept a lot of the dark tones that were explored in the japanese series and it was a fast favorite with the audiences at home now unlike pokemon and other monster genre shows before it in digimon each digi destin has a single digimon that they bond with who all speak and have unusual personalities and are a counterpart to the unusual neurotic or overly confident characters that we get in a kid's anime and unlike pokemon your digimon can die that was one of the biggest changes in the series i mean rip leomon am i right now digimon adventure 02 picks up three years after the original series focusing

4:50 on the two youngest of the original crew tk and kari along with three new digi dustin named davis cody and yo lee and their fancy new digivices now much like adventure before it digimon adventure 02 explored dark and real world issues showed death as a part of the human and digimon experience and also talked about how we can cope with these and be better partners to each other as humans the show really cemented itself not to tell just a funny story but also a heartfelt story and also influence and manipulate the emotions of the viewers unlike most of its partner shows of the time so digimon the movie is a prequel a

5:35 sequel and a continuation kari one of our heroes from both season one and season two narrates through the three sections of the film and they utilize voiceover to introduce a lot of plot in and do some story developing in a way that they were able to when they cut a ton of the original animation now they use this to introduce an american boy named willis or i will also use wallace because that was his name in the uh japanese version i know a typical blonde american boy um who we meet in the third section of the film and as a way to kind of tie in all three parts of the story together in part one we see the first group of dizzy dustin as young children who one night witness

6:20 a colossal digimon fight at their apartment complex and between a giant agumon and no not thai's agamon and a parrotman this would imprint on kari particularly and it would cement the eight kids who would become the digidestined in adventure one now the second section is a sequel to digimon season one digimon adventure at the end of digimon adventure the digi dustin must say goodbye to their digimon who have to stay in the digital world with a being called jedi as they help rebuild after the dark masters destroyed everything but as the world watches a computer virus comes to life in the body of a digimon and it begins a race against the clock as a new digimon called diaboromon

7:07 tries to destroy the internet from the inside out worldwide but one of the original dizzy dustin is a computer whiz named izzy and he's able to get the digi they're digimon partners and to help fight diabolo mom but they are no match so matt and ty end up slipping into the internet as they're watching their digimon in their mega form die and they end up bonding together in what we know becomes the first dna digivolution of mega type omnimon a super knight who was able to defeat diaboromon and man was he [ __ ] cool looking in this version of the story specific to america it was said that wallace or willis accidentally created diaboromon as he was trying to figure out what was wrong with his twin digimon that

7:53 popped out of the computer the same night that ty's digi egg popped out in the first part i know they really got convoluted and trying to make this work together now midway through digimon adventure 2 our heroes are on vacation this is the third part of the film and we see the older digi destined as mid teenagers now and they seem to be going on on with their lives and this third section eventually finds us all in america where the digidescents meet willis and they help him defeat the corrupted kokomon and bring back kokomon in a more purified way back to wallace and his other partner terriermon this movie revisits the ultimate and megaforms of patamanigatoman from digimon adventure 1 as well as introduce the digi golden eggs which we would see pop up in the tv series that's why it's

8:38 truly i'm not sure where they lie because ken the digimon emperor is not in this movie now you're probably saying wow maddie this sounds like a complete [ __ ] and don't worry cause you're right and while the critics didn't appreciate it the audience loved it which would cement why we would continue to get digimon's series on american television disney would eventually release all the japanese films dubbed with their original scripts and the original american voice actors on jedicks and disney xd over the years and these versions of the films are all still available for viewing and i highly recommend uh you doing i'll go into that a little bit later now while the genre of monster partner anime and manga is huge it is still huge

9:26 because of the releasing digimon and pokemon are always put directly in competition with each other and in comparison which you know as a fan of both franchises i couldn't see them as night and day different i always like to put it like this pokemon has the superior video game franchise while digimon has a much more nuanced and interesting television franchise in fact digimon recently celebrated 20 and 25th anniversaries in which they revisit the adventure kids as early 20-somethings and where they are in the world and then having to pick up their digivices again to save our world and the digital world and also see what the ramifications of their actions as children

10:11 have on the future world and they've also completely remade digimon adventure all over again but this time they made it look like what it would look like in 2020 and no i don't mean it's woke or things that you know the american audiences would think it follows a completely different and and i would argue much darker path so these kids are visiting things and discovering things that the original kids wouldn't have had the the vocabulary to deal with while this is not to say that their video games for digimon weren't successful or fun they weren't the main focus of the series but like most franchises of the time they were a necessary part of the marketing machine and they both exist in the giant vacuum of nostalgia that is still paying off 20

10:59 years after its initial inception and debut and i gotta say if any of you have your digimon toys at home particularly your digivices y'all i would pull them out i would buff them out put them on display because yo they are worth a lot of money even so to the point that bandai japan has re-released all of the digi vices in kind of what i like to call an adult collectible form because they understand that adults have um disposable income so you're looking at like they're awesome reproductions they do really cool things but they're like 150 to 200 plus the imports so like i if you still got them pull them out because that is literally gold in your pocket and we'll be right back after this

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12:30 wherever you get your fish to the dish podcasts i like the shallow swiss i like the sushi cause there's never touched a frying pan hot like wasabi when i bust rhymes speak like leanne rhymes because i'm all about value [Music] welcome back so for me the first reason why i love revisiting this film as well as all of its japanese counterparts through season four is because of the animation so unlike the series which was handled by its television division all the shorts and movies were handled by toei animation's film division which meant it looks just a little different to me it's i can describe it as the difference between like a quick digital

13:16 format that you need for a tv show versus a long-form hand-drawn format which isn't directly the case here but i find it's the the easiest way to describe it but there's something so delicate and so whimsical about the line work and while most of the characters have roughly the same costumes in one way or another it's a revisiting to how we look and see these characters whether there are new characters in the digimon adventure 2 section or whether they are our grown-up counterparts to our digimon adventure 1 uh characters in the third section the japanese counterpart we see wendy gomon who is kokomon in the american capture the

14:03 older teen digi dustin and we really see them flex on making these characters look more mature and they had so much fun exploring the evolution of the six into older teenagers and 20 somethings there's a jarring combination of tv footage predominantly in the digivolution sections in the attack sections that were put in specifically for the american film because they needed to pull those moments i guess for the american audiences i'm not really sure why it's mostly in those digivolution sections but in the second portion they leave in the toei we so we not only see their affinity for the animation but also the kind of rich history of kaiju films that are

14:49 personified in this animation in the character design of the fight the characters also move in a more fluid and i hate to use this term again but whimsical way versus the kind of choppy stagnant way that we see in a lot of like frame-to-frame animation series now while the script itself isn't particularly winner and it's not gonna win a pulitzer it was a direct response to the success and i used that term loosely of the first two pokemon movies they really did try their level best to make these films kind of fit together in a cohesive plot for the american version now we've been seeing bandai do this with a lot of their live action properties like power rangers and

15:35 beatleborg since the early 90s and so you could see a lot of the trial and error coming from that to aid in this film of kind of cobbling together the story but they really attempted some major character growth for a lot of these characters in a way that just wasn't present or time didn't allow in a 21 minute version of the tv series though after the triumph that was omnimon in that animation in the second half it's really hard to transition to the golden digi eggs in the third act which still seem a little lackluster though my buddy terrierman would show up again in digimon tamers the third series which makes me so happy the script essentially came down to the fact that the studio refused to pay for a two-hour movie

16:20 now this movie is just over 90 minutes so we're talking the difference of a half an hour of animation in script in editing and voices but like that's very expensive about half an hour i know sam over let's rewatch uh is probably screaming right now about how much a half an hour of animation can cost a feature and so that's what led to most of the third chunk really being cut and it's super easy i encourage you to find all of these in the uh kind of disney xd format of how they uh dub them and release them and i really encourage you all to go and watch that now like a lot of movies of the time a major selling point to me for this

17:06 movie is the soundtrack not even just the score which is great but like the pop soundtrack now when you say digimon digital monsters i don't know what you immediately think but i don't think new wave punk pop ska but this soundtrack is just bright and sunny and features some bands like the mighty mighty boss tones less than jake smash mouth yes it's all star fatboy slim and even a really awesome new rendition of kids in america and they're just a huge sticking point showing as the kids say uh that someone over at bandai and fox truly understood the assignment now i was re-watching this again the other night and it was like oh

17:53 [ __ ] they made these songs just fit so beautifully in and again they were the pop music of the time you could not turn on a radio station without hearing a lot of these songs once or twice an hour so it made the most sense because like parents were begrudgingly being pulled along to see this so now while i don't think story-wise this movie is a super success it causes me to revisit everything that i love about digimon and i have to say i always immediately start a re-watch now right now i didn't start a re-watch i started a watching of the new digimon adventure series because it just ended and y'all [ __ ] it's so good and i know a lot of you listening were a bit older than the target demographic

18:40 that digimon was kind of made for at the time but i gotta say i encourage you to go out and try the first three series they're quite a bit long but i'll tell you by the time you get to digimon tamers [ __ ] does it pay off they have such a rich world that they've built and they continue to build and change and alter and show how it influenced and grow and some of the most amazingly emotional moments that still make me cry to this day again i say rip liam on every [ __ ] season they explore themes that american animes of the time weren't exploring and i dare say it really holds up

19:25 like this movie overall it's kind of garbage but that's they were throwing darts at the wall and trying to make something stick in the mythos and the world building that they continue to rely on 20 and 25 years later y'all it's just top notch though as you expect the critics just they didn't get it parents didn't get it the kids loved it it's got roughly a 24 of rotten tomatoes i know it's not a huge selling point and while just about everyone critically liked it more than they liked either of the pokemon movies it just didn't work for them but like i also don't expect roger ebert to get the digimon movie and i take personal offense because

20:11 the animation part of it in 2000 won the stinkers bad movie awards for worst achievement in animation but like watch this movie and how [ __ ] dare you like this movie the director of these movies would go on to create summer wars inspired by his work on digimon summer awards is a brilliant anime film that i encourage all of you to go watch that is directly inspired by these movies it feels like a digimon movie and like i just find that the worst thing in exaggerate like they can [ __ ] off now after only having a budget of five million dollars to make this movie work now you're probably sitting there going wow five million to make animation that already exists work but like you're shoehorn you were like

20:58 gluing together animation to make it work with a story that's different and oh i get so heated but like it only had a budget of 5 million and it was only released in 1825 theaters worldwide so that is worldwide that is more that that is roughly less than like a third of what most movies get today but it pulled in about 16 million 643 dollars like that's you know a great for the time it wasn't bad especially for this kind of film and you know we have this movie to thank directly for another favorite of everyone over here at smc pod because of the international success of digimon the movie specifically it led

21:45 toshi suzuki to contact mamuru josoda to direct howl's moving castle so go snuggle up with your digimon partner find those digivices open up that digital dive pop some popcorn and give digimon the movie a second go before the wicked witch of the west and those gals from salem there was cersei the captivating and kind of catastrophic greek witch who did more than just turn men into pigs i'm rose i'm kelsey and i'm gloria join us this fall on circling cersei the podcast where we talk about madeline miller's incredible book cersei we go through the novel chapter by chapter we laugh we cry from laughing we swoon over daedalus and other greek hotties and talk way too much about food life and scented candles i'm hydrated

22:32 i'm ready i'm here to talk about greek gods and titans let's do this lasagna is not supposed to be cool it's supposed to be eating hot stupid who just looked at the cows like hey sexy moo right over here like it's 11 45 i need to go eat my liver my prometheus pate and granny's like we oh every wednesday so mark your calendars make like zilla grab a sailor and dive in find circling cersei on spotify or wherever you get your podcast um do you want to do an outro yeah [Laughter] [Music] thanks again for joining us for another deep dive into the files of saturday

23:19 morning confidential these new episode formats are just so much fun for me to do and i get to speak right to you because most of you i know personally and it's a way for us to hang out and i just say thank you don't forget two dollars on our patreon shows me that you love what i'm doing and that you can't wait to see what we have coming in the new year we have three new shows coming i'm not gonna tell you what they are yet we are still pounding them out but i'm hoping that at least three new shows get to come to you in this coming year while we continue to make smc don't forget to come back next time for another deep dive into the files of saturday morning confidential certainpov.com