Breaking Down The Charmingly Absurd Digimon: The Movie

0:00 if you put three individual short films together into one ful length movie it's going to be a confusing mess and saan entertainment the folks that made Power Rangers went ahead and did it anyway Digimon the movie is messy it's non-stop talking for an hour and a half and the only positives people really have to say are that it's Charming the onliners are funny and the soundtrack is an absolute banger but why is Digimon the movie a dumpster fire or a legitimately good adaptation people generally don't think it's something to be considered authentic because it's not Japanese you know like Subs over dubs better yet does it matter if it remains authentic like I'll tell you right now this movie's primary goal was to appeal to the Western Market and it did so by injecting this new overarching story energetic music and copious amounts of

0:46 humor despite needing to make a profit by nature of the media industry I truly believe the creative people that made it stayed true to the spirit and personality of the Japanese short films and by doing so the Digimon movie became a unique Time Capsule into the year 2000 I'm going to break down the entirety of this wacky film starting with the history of the American anime industry leading up to the year 2000 which I think is crucial in understanding the landscape that this movie was being adapted in and ultimately why it's my favorite movie of all [Music] time

1:31 [Music] [Applause] [Music] if you have no idea what I'm talking about as in you're my parents or some of my friends who have no idea what Digimon is Digimon is a multimedia franchise that consists of toys TV shows manga video games movies and trading card games plural there are two Digimon are short for Digital Monsters they are beings made up of computer data that

2:17 live in the digital world the lore of the digital world changes depending on what Canon you're following like whether the world and Digimon were created the same time as computers or if they were always kind of there and computers open the door to this place that always existed the Digimon franchise began as a series of virtual pet toys created by the same team that made tamagachi akosi hongo Who is credited as the series Creator is actually a combination of the names of the Project's core development team now there is a bit of a debate on how many people this actually is but it at least includes akima who came up with the original concept for tamagachi nakatsuru katsu Yoshi who was the animation director and character designer for the first four seasons of the anime and takaichi hongo co-director

3:03 at whiz and formerly bandai's chief tamagachi officer some other possibilities include Hiroshi isawa the author of The V jump manga series and yabuno Tenya the illustrator of the manga series season one Digimon Adventure which is primarily what the short films are based on is about seven kids getting transported to the digital world and have to team up with Digimon to find a way back home and with the help of a human partner the mon able to digi evolve into more powerful forms with the help of a Digivice and other trinkets around 1998 or 1999 tow animation was approached by Bandai to make a 20-minute short film showcasing what Digimon were ultimately meant to [Music]

3:50 be before we go into that film Les's first examined the history of anime in America before the year 2000 in the 1960s early anime was generally geared towards children this ensured widespread appeal because it was simple stories that everybody could enjoy stuff that was like based on fairy tales folktales and daily life sitcom style stories Japanese animators were also clocking the success and Technical achievement of Disney over in the west specifically ozam mutesa who's most known for creating astroboy in 1963 was greatly influenced by a lot of American culture including astronauts movies like Pinocchio and cartoons like Superman his company Mushi Pro would dominate early Japanese TV he would also go on to create Kima in 1965 and the second half

4:38 of the mumen series a known cult classic these days in 1969 a lot of this Japanese animation was indistinguishable from American cartoons to viewers in the US my mom actually watched Astro Boy Speed Racer and Ultram man alongside cartoons like the Jetson and the flit stones and all of these cartoons together really helped to show that animation was viable in the television market unlike science fiction going into the 1970s animation and sci-fi were often looked down upon especially in America and a lot of sci-fi was hard to produce in Japan if it wasn't seen as something that was proper starting his career around this time was the famed hayami isaki who very notably prefers fantasy over Science Fiction with the majority of his films predicated on a dislike of Industry

5:24 technology and the present other things that weren't considered proper I mean look at Godzilla that is an absolutely chunky little boy however there were some more serious series popping up in the 1970s despite this sci-fi or otherwise we have lupon theii in 1971 devil man in 1972 and Space Battleship Yamato in 1974 all of these were dramatic and adult stories featuring well-developed characters and copious amounts of violence because Japan didn't have any restriction around children's programming the American adaptation of Space Battleship yumato starblazers was heavily censored because it was basically World War II in space they had to limit the cultural references violence death and swearing to make it more palatable I suppose to the American

6:12 audience but things with sci-fi would really change with the Star Wars boom Circa 1977 Star Wars itself was heavily inspired by the 1958 kurasawa film The Hidden Fortress and this really signaled the larger introduction of East Asian culture to the United States we have other famous kurasawa films like rashan and the Seven Samurai we also have Kenji fukus Saku coming out with battle without honor and humanity and we also have Bruce Lee films coming out of Hong Kong some culture was as simple as food cars and musical instruments and a lot of the stuff had no clear cultural values like religion or nationalism and the stuff that did could really just be compared to existing American tropes like Cowboys to Samurai Mafia to Yakuza and boxing to Kung Fu if you squint by

6:58 the 1980s it seemed that animation was really starting to get the hang of it and so was the media industry animation on TV was widely considered for children by this point getting stuck in the animation age ghetto Toy tians began to explode thanks to the loosening of the US television code which officially ran from 1952 to 1983 which prohibited the use of profanity drunkenness and addiction among with other things as well as including advertising as previously mentioned a lot of more mature anime was being heavily censored because of this rules and some non-mature ones as well Astro Boy actually had a lot more violence and featured multi-episode plot lines which American Producers felt would not succeed over in the west and all of this goes to show that there was really no

7:43 precedent on how best to adapt read Market Japanese media to Western audiences I would say the best example is the adaptation of matross into Robotech in 1985 arguably and in my opinion the most influential anime in America at all Robotech was three different shows put together that is absolutely true but each one was sort of following each other like a season so the audience didn't have to keep up with this huge cast of characters for an entire show so a lot of people give Robotech Flack for smashing these shows together and kind of being that first one to truly do that but it wasn't as egregious as a lot of people say series producer Carl mes reported receiving death threats for The Butchery that had been made to the original show and they wanted a program

8:31 that would be completely unlike anything that had been on television for animation in the past and um with uh those rules uh and with the help of a lot of people at the harmony golden in Japan we came up with Robo test and people really jump on this guy so hard there's a TV Trope describing similar levels of editing known as a massacre which is kind of hypocritical considering Voltron in 1984 was also massacred but but one of these shows would get a Netflix series and the other is stuck in licensing hell just kidding just kidding I mean it's mainly on Harmony gold because MC would actually go and leave Harmony gold to start streamline pictures a company whose primary goal was to bring anime to the US with no Cuts keeping editing intact

9:16 and original music present and they did this though results May Vary any Aida dub would be hard to make because the animation was done after recording The Voice lines in the original Japanese production so it's not my favorite dub I prefer the one with Joshua Seth for obvious reasons but I can understand where they're coming from with having a really hard time with this one their dub of Castle of kostro as well actually faced copyright issues with the Maurice Leblanc estate which is also understandable of a problem to deal with 21st century thinking has proven that not only could Western audiences understand Eastern cultural complexities but that they wanted to this is where sabon entertainment comes in they're definitely not as Infamous as

10:03 four kids but they're not really great either it was founded in 1980 as a music production company by now media Mogul Heim Saban whose origin story is the most fake it till you make it thing that I have ever heard there's this really wild story where he's trying to find a band to play in this really crappy Club so he's just going around asking everybody that he knows and eventually someone says yeah I hear music out of this apartment building sometimes you should check it out and this guy waits for three whole days for the music to start playing again and he starts knocking on people's doors trying to find who is in this band and wouldn't you know it it's this band called The Lions of Judah not Judah and the lion no no no a pretty cool like kind of Psych

10:49 rockish band and he would go on to be their fake bass player because he didn't actually know how to play much base so at some point he puts his arm in a fake cast so he can you know not have to play cuz the there were stipulations that he had to be in the band that he said that he had so he got away with it by just turning the amp off or pretending to have a broken arm it's the wildest [ __ ] I've ever heard but um saon would eventually become their manager and a music promoter as well but then he almost went bankrupt uh which kind of tracks for the music industry and would move to Paris in 1975 at some point around here he was still managing some other artists but he meets

11:34 this guy this Legend Shi Levy and they both moved to Los Angeles together in 1983 now saon discovered this huge loophole when it came to music copyright they were basically separate royalty licenses for cartoons and the music in the cartoons so basically the animation would be under one copyright license meanwhile the music would be under another and Saban realized hey wait a minute like some of this music is not that difficult to produce what if I start asking to retain the rights to these music licenses and that's what he did he would go around to different Animation Studios offering to make all of their music for them for free as long as they could retain copyright saon and Levy would go to make some of the most popular 8s cartoon

12:20 themes ever like X-Men Inspector Gadget He-Man and Shira and you know heathcliffe I guess I'm not really sure on the exact amount of music that sabon actually made as compared to Shuki Levy but um let's just say some of the songs that are under both of their names do not all sound the same they are not all made the same and this is where we get into Power Rangers if you know the story sabon went around to different media Studios probably for anywhere from 6 to 8 years I keep seeing different numbers trying to pitch this show called bioman and eventually Fox would take a chance on it in 1993 and rename it Power Rangers if you don't know Power Rangers is an adaptation of the Japanese series Super

13:07 Sentai and Power Rangers did so well that it really doesn't need much further discussion but it is worth mentioning that super centi was produced by to the same Studio that created Digimon and the toys were created by Bandai who would make the Digimon toys in the first place you can't talk about sabon entertainment without talking about the sack disput sabon basically lived in hot water with SE because of Power Rangers ever since it came out complaints of child actors being incredibly underpaid the story of the original red black and yellow rangers is one of those known quantities which is why they ended up getting replaced about halfway through the series and there would eventually be a massive boycott and huge consequences if you were a sag actor caught working with sabon it's safe to speculate that sabon

13:54 was all Union after this massive boycott based on the cast list and another dispute would crop up when Digimon the movie started production it was pretty obvious that it was going to be this completely new product and based on that there should be residuals for actors because it's not just a simple dub there were no further articles kind of mention that it even existed so something was probably negotiated between the two parties YouTuber botl Productions actually emailed sag trying to get a little bit more information about this dispute and they didn't get any response and now that discotech me I has announced their plans to not only re-release the movie on Blu-ray but redub the original Japanese films it's kind of a moot point I am pretty sad this means I can't watch the movie on

14:41 YouTube in 480p anymore though but this announcement was huge I had to re-record this section because this took me so off guard but I am hype sabon would go on to achieve his first billion dollars in 1995 thanks to Power Rangers it's kind of crazy to think that in just 20 years he went from basically bankrupt to Media Tycoon major funer of the democratic party and close friend of the president of the United States just wild to me how little time this took like this man is a money-making machine going into the 1990s it was truly better times all around thanks to faster production Cycles the trend of actively localizing Japanese media to better suit American tastes begins in part due to the Consumer Electronics boom there was all this new and accessible technology

15:26 coming out computers with Productions software like Daws and Graphics editors email which made it super easy to collaborate over any distance as well as VCRs which became so much cheaper to produce and buy uh back in the 70s some of these cost over $1,000 all of this technology would completely change our relationship with media as a whole and really start the push for on demand content that we now see satisfied with dreaming culture these days and VHS tapes were crucial to sharing early anime in the US shows would often get canceled without warning or were only available in major cities California or Hawaii and a lot of people would start to record episodes and Anime clubs would make copies for people fans would write episode synopses transcripts fan subs and dubs just so they can get

16:13 anime out there without this advanced technology it's really possible that anime would have never found its ways into America and certainly have never established a foothold people in America were already getting bored of American Media and at the same exact time m franchises specifically aimed towards children began popping up both in Japan and America obviously complete with toys we have Sailor Moon in 1992 Yu-Gi-Oh in 1998 Pokemon also in 1998 and Digimon in 1999 now we can do some educated storytelling here Saban probably struck a deal with toi and Bandai directly considering there was only a 5mon difference between the release of the first season in Japan and the first season in America the Airing schedules were so close to together it left little

16:59 time for rewrites and editing and the American adaptation of Digimon was actually inadvertently faithful to the original which leads us into the year 2000 where our story takes place by then Japanese intellectuals were proclaiming Japanese products had become indispensible to American daily life and they were kind of right cell phones Pages PlayStation one and two you might think it was the Japanese who were responsible but anyone in the know knows that it was Bibble bizel and all about Bibble cuz only Bibble keep it over this dependence was really what created the Y2K scare because Tech became super Advanced super fast just to explain a little bit about Y2K if you don't really remember what it is programmers took this coding shortcut by getting rid of the first two digits of the year because storage cost so much back then most

17:46 computers like phones Electronic Banking mass transit and power plants everything was really using this trick to save space probably not nuclear weapon systems but you can't really say for sure you know at least iner America it's been seen time and time again there's this distrust when the general public becomes faced with new and complicated things only about half of American households had a computer going into the New Millennium and Japan and hold holding just launched mobile internet the year before people were scared of what could happen and the true price of tech convenience but despite fearmongering the turn of the century brought about this huge sense of excitement about the future though the pre- 911 naivity bubble would pop but not before Digimon the movie would come out

18:42 the movie Project began about a month and a half earlier than the series in February or March of 1998 and the creative team didn't really have much to work with character-wise there were the vandai virtual pet games there was also the V jump manga project come on Digimon and V Tamer All The Monsters designs were done by Kenji Watanabe who drew inspiration from the American comic spawn as well as from artists like Mike magnola who created Hellboy but eventually katsu Yoshi nakas sudu who was one of the character designers for Dragon Ball did these atypical cool retro character designs for the show some people even called him a substitute Akira Toriyama for how good he was at copying that initial style of Dragon Ball I've actually always thought the ties goggles were really reminiscent of old school basketball players like Horus Grant and Kareem Abdul Jabar but that is

19:29 not at all correct um it was actually based on pilot goggles but let me have my things let me have them ultimately they set the movie in a different timeline to avoid contradictions with the show the characters from the series weren't in the original storyboards but the producer homi ski would suggest their inclusion to create a link to the series which I thought was pretty smart on her part the original concept was a bit of a spin-off of the V jump manga series so taichi's dad was going to be the main character and they would set this movie during the third decade of the showa era the late 1950s to the 1960s which would be a similar era that classic Kaiju movies took place in but specifically during the 1964 Tokyo Olympics unfortunately to said to the director

20:14 hey man you know you can't make a Kaiju movie in 20 minutes and you know mamoru Hoda went ahead and said okay Bet mamoru hassa is arguably one of the biggest directors in anime in recent years and it just seems with every single movie that he makes his popularity just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger but before movies like a girl who leapt Through Time wolf children and marai mamora hota actually started out as a key animator he became inspired to work in animation by miyazaki's lupon film castle of cagliostro and was even approached to work on Hal's Moving Castle but ended up either getting fired or leaving the project sources may vary but in various interviews he always mentions that he has a number of Western influences that inspired him Hollywood Classics European Cinema Billy Wilder Woody Allen's Annie Hall

21:00 and Midnight in Paris and recent movies like Birdman Revenant and gravity hoto would make his directorial debut with Digimon Adventure and he originally meant for it to be a slapstick comedy where the Digimon would make a complete mess of Tokyo there's actually a really fun story in the Digimon movie book where he was like on this mission to get monjayaki which is a type of Japanese batter pancake like while he was out doing scouting but he realized the time constraints on the movie necessitated this to be in a single place so he picked an apartment complex specifically the one closest to tow headquarters for the reasons of the movie he set it there because it would include lots of children they would automatically be framed and placed as part of the audience like they would get this View from Above almost like they were in a

21:45 Coliseum or a fighting ring but the kids were going to share the secret of waking up together and seeing this group of monsters fighting and it made them special mamor Hoda really specifically wanted to focus on depicting this unrealistic thing in a realistic way at its core it's a film about children meeting Digimon like a meet cute until things you know actually get serious he took inspiration from this from the Spanish film Spirit of the Beehive from 1973 which is about two sisters and one's fascination with Frankenstein's Monster the movie wanted to focus on this contrast between the child who grows up and the one who doesn't and we see in Digimon Adventure 99 that Tai is already taking care of Hikari by himself making breakfast for her and trying to protector because she still sits in a high chair and talks with a whistle Hoda

22:31 really wanted to make it clear that Digimon weren't Just Pets or companions like evolution in itself wouldn't really serve a purpose without showing a digimon's different sides like they're not good or evil they act out of self-preservation coron just goes from being a soot Sprite to taking dumps to shooting Fireballs to taking names all in the span of 20 minutes and TI really didn't completely accept Digimon until the end when he started to admire them for this violence but Hikari started to be scared of them for the same exact reason and that is the dichotomy that Hodo was really trying to capture and the penultimate moment when it captures this flip of this Dynamic is when Tai uses the whistle it represents him fully

23:17 accepting this point of view that he used to reject I thought that if I could depict that kind of inversion I could make this a film even if it's only 20 minutes long Memorial ahota the VHS opens with a synopsis of a series that was definitely needed going through our main characters as well as the concept of what Digimon are and then there's the Angela Anaconda thing which I absolutely refuse to talk about to even speculate on why this Canadian cartoon had a promo for Digimon that ended up at the beginning of the film it took up 4 minutes four whole [ __ ] minutes of this movie and those four minutes it wouldn't have saved the story story it wouldn't have saved like necessarily anything it might have made the third movie make even a lick more

24:04 sense but like there were only two kids in this world the ones who wanted a digimon and the ones who wanted to be a digimon and finally when we get into the actual opening of the movie we come upon this incredible Gem of a piece of music known as the digi rap now somewhere on the internet I'm not sure where it even originated I tried to find more research but somebody with the name Josh de was like listed as being mCP but I couldn't find exactly where this was besides one website just kind of having it and it didn't really indicate who added that information but there is another song credited under his name for the Blue Crush soundtrack I don't even know what this movie is but the song Big Love by

24:49 The Band Chicken it actually sounds incredibly like mCP pod's voice so I'm a little bit inclined to agree it kind of maddens me that I don't know the answer to this cuz I feel like y'all on the internet have been slacking and not really asking the right questions but like whatever I really don't want to go over the adaptation of the first movie let alone the whole movie at all I just feel like a proper media analysis doesn't need 30 minutes of summary of what's going on in the movie I'll do it where it's relevant but in general the first movie since we already talked about it it's pretty faithful to the original minus the Ki narration and talk of as a character the lack of taichi's dad was really because he was a drunk and came home drunk and started banging on the children's door um which I'm kind of

25:37 glad they cut this one out I don't think it really added to the movie as a whole and as a kid I just assumed he worked a lot and just wasn't really present especially based on the second part where they kind of talk about how oh we can't move my dad's stuff like this is his computer yada yada so I think it's kind of a good change that they decided to cut this very small portion of the movie out the changes to the score also created a cohesive tie between all three parts of the movie and while it is very hollywood-esque like very classical heroic and epic I just really don't feel like revel's Bolero would have translated as well culturally um it is a pretty famous piece of music but it's very repetitive and it's very not super great for trying to convey a story that is really drastically changing that much

26:24 and I believe truly that the change in tone is just absolutely Ely obvious from this point onwards you know we really shouldn't be playing in Street did you see that no I was sleeping but you're driving our war game is undoubtedly the movie that holds up the best it's got a really neatly packaged Story the digi Justin are on summer vacation after the events of the first season and one of them sees this Digi egg become infected with a computer virus and just start going aggro it starts eating computer data from all over the Internet messing with daily life and and dig evolving incredibly quickly it's up to the only kids that are still at home or near a computer that's rare enough to find in those days to beat it and save the day most of the Digimon Adventure kids are busy doing whatever motivates them or

27:11 relaxing and they're just not really present in the story so by the end it's only Tai Matt Izzy and TK who are even available to fight this monster and it really shows that one of the true battles is actually like being being able to gather your group of people after you know real life sort of sets in and not everybody can be physically present to save the world and it's just kind of a fact of life it was originally meant to be about the Y2K problem but it was simplified to make it Timeless and obviously this worked we're still talking about the movie today and not really talking about y 2K diaboromon is more natural disaster than evil not unlike a digital Kaiju which is a really

27:56 good followup to the first movie the title is also directly inspired by War games from 1983 a movie in which Matthew brri plays feris buer except if he were a elite hacker who could hack into a government supercomputer via the telephone line and end up playing a game with it and then almost accidentally launching the world into nuclear war you know casual casual things that just happened on a Tuesday afternoon I actually really like war games it's one of my favorite movies the countdown at the end was also inspired by an American Film speed from 1994 where Keanu re tries to stop a bus that has been rigged with a bomb that will explode if it goes under 50 m an hour it's it's unfinished just like speed oh no right behind you

28:48 oh but the timer in the movie isn't exactly 10 minutes long which is so aggravating I sat there with a timer for the most part it lines up but it ends up being like a minute off at some point and it just felt like a waste of time to sit there and do that but I had to let you all know in addition to a neatly package Story the film has such colorful animation and it's like an incredibly unique depiction of the internet especially for the year 2000 the first film was actually traditionally cell animated and not only can you tell from some behind the scenes video of the second movie being painted on computers but you can also tell from these Shadows on the actual cells itself they leave like a very distinct Mark and it's just really cool to see early CGI featured it does look super low res even when it is

29:34 in HD but it's still such a cool thing to kind of depict the internet in this way using computer generated images and Hoda points out that he really wanted this film to be comedic he wanted it to be comedy from an objective point of view like the whole situation itself is something that's silly and he does this through really exaggerated facial expressions movements and gestures like he really uses poopy potty jokes in this one just like the first one but at the same time the things that they're struggling with are super funny themselves like too many emails having to play phone tag with voicemail School Mimi's postcard from Hawaii that just shows up because the mom happened to

30:20 remember it and the blue screen of death like it's all objectively really mundane but funny things it's that same type of idea of depicting realistic things in an unrealistic way and it's like the end of the world when you find out that Mimi isn't able to come over because she's on vacation with her parents and the final punchline with the missile hitting the river was this sigh of of relief after the serious turn this movie took like there's no way that that would have happened in the way that it did and I love the way that he does humor it is really subtle and really deliberate with his choices and it's not quite like a American humor but this type of non-verbal humor really transcends language in a way that not a lot of people seem to talk about especially

31:06 when it comes to dubbing anime if all of those things that I just mentioned were as funny to you as they seem to me then oh is the dub a freaking joy to sit through and watch and it's all thanks to the two main writers Jeff nemoy and Bob buckles now Jeff nemoy who is the second cousin once removed I believe of Leonard nemoy he started out his career by competing in rap competitions and being involved in some improv groups the majority of jeffie moy's career has been in anime voice acting directing and producing though he has worked on a dub parody show called chimp Lim's Theater now Bob buckles has mostly worked as an English language director but I'm not actually sure what that means um he also worked on chimp

31:53 lips Theater which is where he met nemoy and he also worked on another dubbed parody show called mad movies with the LA connection which is a pretty okay Abridged classic movie series I actually really find it enjoyable all of their episodes are pretty much available on YouTube because the guy that leads the troop La connection just still seems to be uploading it bookal is also known for some of his voice acting roles most notably Jean starwin from Outlaw Star and he also has done some voice directing and script adaptation primarily for the first few seasons of Digimon but as I made clear using the comedy from pre-existing footage was the writer's main area of expertise and this is exactly what they did with the Digimon movie they inserted humor that was topical for 2000s America like

32:39 Health Food nuts have only gained more power in the past 22 years and making Tai's mom this like insanely bad cook who was doing all these like wild recipes like spinach cookies and jerky shakes like it's just such a good joke made off of like one thing where Izzy ended up having to run to the bathroom because he just drank too much oolong tea which is pretty funny but making it because of her recipes adds this new layer to her character that just wasn't there before she was just in the background another addition that they add to something that's already there is every single phone joke didn't you hear me what it's busy I'm sorry lady there are also a few

33:25 other jokes that I just find pretty funny in their own right based on the delivery but they do have things to say about what it was like in 2000s America the up Link's working we're back online now let's exterminate that bug he left the phone company now where is he look he sends another email I'm close to him close to who he's in America he doesn't even have a green card and like I mentioned a bit earlier characters that aren't really present get some character added to them like Joe's huge thing with wanting to go to summer school Mimi being very vapid leave a very short message after the beat Mia that girl loves to talk and not even just Mrs kamama being a bad cook but the

34:11 fact that Izzy indulges her in these things that is a whole little extra layer to his character that in the originals may have just been because he wanted to be polite and help out Tai's mom but now he actually really likes her recipes despite them being bad in addition to jokes I think there are actually a lot of good localization decisions that they made for the film not much changes regarding the story between the Japanese and the English ones aside from connecting the concept of a DJ egg and the computer to the first short film and adding in the character of Willis from the third diaab Boron who is previously a non-existent threat that paralleled Y2K and nukes now gets new voice lines he gets a goal he gets motivations and now he's outright malicious as a villain when before

34:56 before he just kind of seemed like this uh te kind of weird spider thing that was really creepy but not as creepy now that he's not like I'm doing this on purpose and I'm going to obliterate you my absolute favorite are these two shots that almost mimic each other both from the second part and the first part or gmond TI I can't move ug it's so good sometimes the movie Just does everything right it lines up the music It lines up the exact emotional feeling it just does everything right and then it goes and ruins it it always ruins [Music] it warmond met G they did Evol together to

35:45 become [Music] omnimon Transcendent sword hurry [Music] show them all the things the we can't knew let's kick it out together it's been you looked me your head I'm angry now the reason that I translate it as hurricane touchdown and not hurricane Landing is because that's I saw it once and you know I'm an American and I'm just going to do what I want so

36:31 touchdown it is this film was directed by shasu Yamauchi who is a highly skilled episode director and storyboarder Yamauchi was actually a mentor to kunihiko ikuhara the creator of revolutionary girl utina as well as mamoru hosoda during his time at toi some of his main work includes directing episodes of ojama joori as well as Dragon Ball Z and in terms of large series that he's done he's directed Boys Over Flowers as well as some early sa seya films yuchi has this very distinct visual style it is so apparent in a lot of the work that he does it all includes deep color contrast very expressive close-ups a lot of the camera angles convey abstract themes like feeling small and lost and it's almost like a

37:19 horror media level of presentation in how drastic some of these decisions are and it really tracks for him to direct this movie based on its story and themes as well cuz it's not quite dark like Digimon Tamers would kind of take it to be dark but cookon goes and commits property damage and he decides to really bring some existential dread to the series that it was there but it wasn't there you know he also tackles the theme of what it means to make mistakes as well as accepting that the past is well and truly over and it's time to move on I would say that hurricane Dutch down has has a pretty basic story it's not super far off in the adaptation where Wallace's Digimon gets infected with the virus and it starts kidnapping some of

38:04 the original Digi Destin to try and find Wallace as a kid again the 02 game comes together to fight cookon and it digivolves and no one knows what to do and then there's Digi eggs and they really just said how about we Digi evolve to our mega forms and see if that helps and you know why don't you just go ahead and throw the whole marima section of the Tel Aviv Symphony Orchestra at him and see if that helps too it doesn't make sense even in the original even as much as people try to pretend that it does in addition to the almost lacad isical way of telling a story this movie has a very eclectic soundtrack and I don't mean that in the same way that I would say that the American movie has a soundtrack like that but this one is full of really odd electronic jazz fusion and Americana and folk music and

38:52 I don't really know quite what to make of it it makes the movie even slower when you have a slow almost walking through the motions kind of track that you have over a fight scene like who would put jazz fusion over a fight scene it just feels so odd and it makes me feel like I'm watching a movie that's really just a dream at the end of the day and maybe that was the purpose of it to make it feel almost like a dreamlike state it fits in with Yamauchi style it fits in with the backgrounds it fits in with the almost vacation-like atmosphere that this movie is going for and it's not what I would have chosen for the movie but then again if you've listened to any of the soundtrack Going through this video you know the kind of things that I would have chosen for the movie the adaptation of this film is certainly

39:38 not awesome but you know I think it's better I think it's better like in the American version it's actually Willis's fault that a virus was let out to infect both this egg and one of his twin Digimon you can tell it's running on Humes the whole way through to the all-star dance Montage but it actually fixed a lot of things that I think really add to the story and cut down on that long hour and a half track time like listen we don't even know what happens to the older kids at the end of the original film they do not tell us there is no shot to indicate that they get to go back home to where they come from this is such a plot hole it drives me absolutely crazy to see so many people say that this is such a huge deal and they took this out of the movie and it really changed it and it made it

40:24 worse and no it didn't it made it better I'm telling you it made it better like the only point of this plot point the only service it gives to the story is to provide them motivation to even go to Colorado in the first place and it's such a loose motivation like it's almost as Loose as what they ended up doing by saying hey there's just a new kid with a digimon like they've gone to different countries in season 02 like oh my God I'm sorry I am ranting first way longer than I thought I was going to rant but this point about the third film drives me crazy C especially when people use it as a negative I think that it's such a positive that they removed it it was Superfluous you didn't need it especially with the direction they were trying to go in with having to add this movie on in the first place but I can

41:09 admit that there are things that it didn't fix like the pacing is at a bright neck speed it's just non-stop the whole movie really is non-stop from start to finish but especially the third part it just you think it's over and it's not at the same time any actual comedy just seemingly feels like it's done by accident it's not really funny on purpose like Davis in general is an absolute hilarity to watch his delivery is so genuine and that's all to do with his voice actor Brian Donovan just being a really genuine type of guy I love his delivery of Davis it's so good the flame broiled or grilled line I think is actually a dig on McDonald's versus Burger King which I only realize that now as I'm sitting here recording it not

41:55 necessarily think back on it that hard but like that's not funny it's just not funny I will say this line takes me out every single time I watch it this is my fault why are you the one who taught him to juggle us down you CL good [Music] morning Digimon the movie's whole soundtrack was generally praised for its eclectic choice of 2000's pop alt Rock SCA Punk and Hip-Hop it was not unheard of for American theatrical releases to change the music so drastically the American

42:41 release of Ghost in the Shell actually had an original song which was a collaboration between youu and Brian Eno there was even a sabon entertainment dub show called macron 1 which would cover pop songs during some of its fight scenes Pokémon 2000 actually Fe featured a lot of American music on its soundtracks like the power of one which was an original song for the movie by Donna Summer Pokemon by weird ow which all right it's actually pretty wild to think about how much PA Warner Brothers had on their own right for the Digimon movie more music was thrown in in an effort to appeal to a wider audience and this is where they took some risks of course they included licensed music from popular artists at the time most notably the Vans warp toilet lineup Less Than

43:26 Jake the mighty mighty bossones and Bare Naked Ladies as well as including stuff that was just at the top of the charts or really big hits on the radio at the time Fatboy Slim was inescapable in the year 2000 and it was going to be on that soundtrack whether anybody made the decision to put him on it or not it's a little bit weird of a choice but I can understand listening to this Fat Boy Slim album and thinking I don't really know what other song has the type of energy that we're looking for and maybe the title is a little bit inappropriate but let's just go ahead and think that no one really knows what this song is about and as long as it's not Fat Boy Slim is [ __ ] in heaven I mean perfect for a kids movie am I right Smashmouth was actually really hesitant to license any of their music for film and frontman

44:13 Steve Harwell said we'd been approached for multiple movies that were supposed to be the hot [ __ ] and they [ __ ] fizzled out they were all just [ __ ] movies and it's pretty well known these days that there are only five movies that ever licensed out the song Allstar Inspector Gadget mysterymen Digimon the movie Rat Race and the most famous Shrek from 2001 the Canadian band Len was approached to cover Kim Wild's 1981 hit Kids In America which is also ironic considering this is yet another Canadian tie to sabon entertainment that doesn't really have an explanation or any real reason of why this happened and why kids in America I mean I really like their sound so I'm not upset I love this cover it's absolutely incredible End music but

44:58 this kind of sunk their music career like I found an article that said that they were really hoping to use this push from the movie to get another record deal or to get a little bit more traction so they can finish up their second album in the studio and they have never released another album after you can't stop the bum rush it is so disappointing but the soundtrack got filled in with some great Originals by two other composers that were approached to create checks Paul Gordon and Jason Radford Paul Gordon was primarily a TV composer he had done the themes and some other music for Power Rangers in space and Power Rangers Turbo towards the end of his career he ended up doing mainly touring with bands like the New Radicals and The B-52s Jason Radford was the frontman for a 2000's new metal band one-sided zero and because of his

45:45 exposure from those record label interactions sabon entertainment reached out about doing one song for the movie which eventually became three Radford said it was totally out of my wheelhouse because it was for kids they were very straightforward lyrics but it was a lot of fun the tldr is that sabon and fox really put in a lot of effort and money to make this movie sound good and it's not just the music like the sound design is so extensive like they even add a little touch of Reverb And Delay while they're hanging out in the internet they really proved that it was a legit Hollywood production everything is filled to the brim with sound and it's even recorded in 5.1 audio which basically arranges sound based on the location of what's happening on screen kind of to mimic surround sound Vibe Japan doesn't really record TV shows

46:31 like this because it's expensive for a few years in the early 2000s there was a huge percentage of anime DVDs that have 5.1 drob tracks but eventually Publishers would figure out that it didn't really make people want to buy a show more than they weren't going to already but I think that it was a nice addition maybe one day when I get the DVD I can actually tell you all how it sounds because God knows I'm not spending that much on a DVD right right now ultimately they just went with some interesting music they put in a lot of effort and production costs all to take some chances on some really eclectic and off-the-wall music Fox was a big name and it was a symbiotic relationship for bands to be featured on the soundtrack and kind of get traction based on these movie

47:18 sales so what happened to Digimon after Digimon the movie well season 3 of Tamers would leave the adventure universe after two whole seasons of it and it's not my favorite um I never claimed to have good taste but they will go back to continue the story of the second film with revenge of diaab boron in 2001 which would eventually get adapted by Disney in 2005 it directly follows the story of our war game but features the 02 kids as the main characters it's just I don't really like it it's just like even gellan flying through the air fight scenes and [ __ ] and even though nemoy came back to do the script there's there's only one funny joke and it's mostly played straight I'm not really sure what to make of it where are they on I don't see them don't worry Ki I'm jaman and I will

48:05 find them maybe I should have taken a left at the search engine I told you to stop and ask for directions just like a man I really like the art style I like that Ken Ichi Joi is actually in this one but you know it just is what it is but Bai would not be done with Digimon Adventure because in 2016 they began to release six films as the Digimon try series as well as releasing last evolution kazuna in 2021 in my opinion these are not bad but they're not good they're just not good I only watched try one and two and last evolution kazuna I watched them all dubbed by the way um try like was really bad it was it was really bad I just could not get past Ty and Matt's

48:53 angst Fest it was kind of in sufferable though I will say that having almost basically every Digimon VA back and Tai Izzy and Mimi it was absolutely great it was so refreshing to hear their voices again and see them bring that character back to life in the way that I remember from 20 years ago kazuna felt like summer Wars and Pokemon put together it was weird I enjoyed the callbacks and the opening fight animations there were less of the original vas but it was mostly good I really enjoyed who they C for Matt in this movie unlike try however the screenplay adaptation which was also done by Jeff nemoy was actually working off of a bad translation thanks to this Tumblr user for pointing it out and kind of going through but it really

49:40 messed up the messaging of the film by you know taking it kind of not not quite literally but just not really doing the Japanese Justice and it's just kind of unfortunate I am really glad that he included the poly w a cracker joke I wish there were more jokes but maybe I'll have to give it another watch just to but same thing it was just a tye and Matt Ang Fest and I'm glad I watched it because it is over and I don't have to watch it anymore now what happened to the people who worked on it well H Saban became a billionaire uh probably in part because he sold Fox kids to Disney in 2001 well now besides doing philanthropy work and being involved with the Democratic party he actually has gotten back into the music industry again with the sabon music group as well as having

50:27 his own star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame he's still doing his thing Shuki leby is still doing his thing mamoru Hoda has been slated as the next M aaki or whatever that means it is interesting to think that in his films he's been exploring the same thematic and visual motifs that he did in Digimon such as with the girl who left through time and Summer Wars which is basically just Digimon our war game over again but with original characters his newer films are focused on children in Parenthood like wolf children and meai because he has become a father even as early as Digimon he was examining those relationships between siblings and the way that we interact with the world around us he's honestly a very internet friendly director and he goes out of his way to show that the goal of the Internet TV

51:12 and phones are to build communities and Bridge the distance between people which is so anti- Miyazaki that man hated technological change so much that he made a whole movie about environmentalism I don't know why people call him the de Baki it's so silly but my favorite thing that mamoru Hoda has done is actually this Louis Vuitton ad alongside tekashi morakami people were actually saying about this commercial oh my God you made Digimon in the tekashi murakami style and I was like no it's the other way around shikay yasuyama Uchi would take a huge break he would go on to direct cashon sins in 2008 and it sort of became a cult classic considering it was a adaptation of cashon and he has directed The Dream eer Mary OVA in 2013 as well as Alice in

51:58 deadle school from 2021 and it's just good to see that he's still around he's incredibly talented and his art style is so unique that it would be a shame to see him completely break away from the anime industry Bob buls remains a man of mystery he's done a lot of voice directing with the world ends with you wak Fu Final Fantasy type zero Kingdom Hearts 2 and three he's also dialogue directed Violet evergarden and its films as as well as English language directed The Devil Man crybaby adaptation I haven't really heard anything about the quality of violet evergard or devil man crybaby so that makes me inclined to think that he's doing a pretty damn good job so go Bob and the guy of the hour Jeff nemoy now nemoy has said that Digimon really gave him a credibility

52:45 that he didn't have before despite having a sports Emmy Award he went on to Voice direct Zach Bell Naruto Digimon Data Squad and the computer generated Ultram Man series in 2019 he would also do the script adaptation for Booboo B Bobo as well as create his own film famous about what it's like to be a guest at an anime convention these days it's funny it's a little bit cringe but I actually really enjoyed it as somebody that goes to Anime conventions and I saw a lot of people kind of shot for shot in my own life that I've seen at these Anime conventions so I can understand wanting to make something about that experience and ultimately I'm just glad that he's exploring the those themes of what it's like to be known and cared for by people for the things that you've

53:31 created I wish they had marketed the movie better and I wish they would have left my first cut alone but what's done is done and it still didn't tarnish the fact that I had a chance to make a movie which is a chance a lot of people in this business never get so I might have said I wasn't going to talk about Angela Anaconda but you know I cannot ignore the forchan divorce post where this poor kid thinks that going to see the Digimon movie caused like a huge argument between his parents and then they got a divorce like a couple months later what a piece of criticism am I [Music] right and while we're on the subject of lwh hanging fruit let's just go ahead right now and address the comparison to

54:17 Pokémon the two have been compared since the beginning of time before Christ and I don't really understand it because there's no real goal to catch all the Digimon or be the very best like the kids have one partner and that partner actually speaks English or Japanese like they can convey language and the digital world as a concept is separate from the real world it's not this alternate universe where Pokemon exist and you know just kind of roam around like birds and where does the chicken come from do they eat meat I don't understand the first Pokémon movie was actually also three parts two of whom were related reled in the other Pikachu's vacation and I'm not saying that there's not reasons to like Pokémon it had an attainable goal like for achievement not

55:04 necessity like survival or saving the world kids growing up in '90s America were probably drawn to themes of exploration and freedom like they just came out of the80s stranger danger panic and were really craving this like you know ability to do things and video games were starting to give them that outlet it was created out of bug catching and collecting for goodness sakes me while Digimon focuses more on working together with different personalities to face life-threatening situations and they still had their fears and problems back in the real world who were influencing the kids way more through their absence than their presence it was way more high stakes and a less idealistic view of growing up fighting other monsters instead of trainers also lent opportunities for World building to Digimon like the

55:49 autonomy of the mon like discussed about the first movie as well as opportunities for villains like the dark Dark Masters who were the final antagonists of season 1 they are Digimon but they're highly intelligent ones ultimately I think it's kind of ridiculous to compare the first Pokemon film to the Digimon film because understandably so it is a cash grab both of them are cash grabs and ultimately their stories have nothing to do with each other Mewtwo as a villain is this whole thing trying to focus on who am I what is my identity what is life itself meanwhile Digimon the movie is just trying to you know put three films together that have three ultimately different messages I guess you can say that that's kind of what happens in the Pokemon movie Mewtwo does destroy the

56:34 lab and then Mewtwo invites them to his Island that how did first of all how did he get an island second of all why is he inviting trainers like they never really explain it besides the fact that he hates humans and I just I don't like the first Pokémon movie I like the second one cuz they collect the cool little glass balls now to get into into a little bit of General criticism about the movie it obviously has a nonsensical story The pacing is way too fast and there's absolutely no time to catch a break but the critic reviews from a lot of newspapers back in the day are absolutely scathing to put it mildly Lawrence van gelder of the New York Times says Digimon comes off as noisy and Ill conceived long on morphing monsters short on storytelling talent

57:20 and uneven in its efforts at animation and it should be noted that the little girls in Digimon the movie are represented mainly as vus party animals or budding sex objects all right at best that's a little harsh at worst FBI open up there's also something painfully ironic about a man born in 1933 being sent to watch Digimon the movie in the year 2000 modern review sites like rotten tomatoes Metacritic and even YouTube actually say all of those things that I said in the beginning the positives like the soundtrack's a banger it's an underrated master piece etc etc and I'm really here for this push against professional criticism in recent years I think it's awesome like recognizing dumb but still liking it anyway is Peak media literacy but it

58:07 kind of touches on this larger issue of what extent adults take children's media seriously should they be subject to the same degree of criticism as other films or what metric should it be judged by like adults are not the target audiences but they are the bill payers is the primary goal entertainment making money or both regardless of what you were I think George Miller director of both Mad Max and Happy Feet puts it best in my opinion kids movies are just like any other story The Good Ones Will endure and the bad ones will become invisible whatever you think about dubs put it aside for a second and just think about like why they're necessary in the first place early on when media started to you know be able to spread internationally the process of subtitling stuff on film was not easy at

58:53 first from intertitle to chemical stamping to laser engraving in the 1980s and then digital sometime later some filmmakers back then put forth that film is to be watched not read what about the hearing impaired illiterate or people that just cannot read fast honestly the way that people have started filming movies now that microphones work like there's a whole great video from Vox about it I highly recommend watching it it kind of talks about like how technology is what's changing our psychology towards media and honestly the internet in the early days as well as now is an indispensable outlet for Van engagement like this very debate there's an incredibly deep point I could make regarding anime fans and the globalizing of America but I really just want to talk about the fun stuff like it

59:39 used to be so lame to like anime that you would actively get made fun of for it it would even take Japan until the mid 2000s to fully Embrace its gross national cool but around the late 1990s people realized it was easier to make a website than they thought using hosting platform forms like geoc cities we got this surge of fan sites that started developing there were like a combination info site plus blog in this era pre Wikipedia and pre- Tumblr and pre-live journal people would put up episode synopses transcripts fan art fanfic Etc kind of like early anime clubs would provide for people it was just online and not through the mail I used to be all up in the taido resarch center and I remember somebody actually made a subedit of the second movie for these two people were going absolutely wild

1:00:27 and I love it I absolutely love it I just love when media exists in the gap between the driver's seat and copyright infringement but if we're going to talk about what fans have created not just for Digimon but for anime at all we have to talk about fan dubs in a Bridge series some of the notable groups from these early days are pine salad Studio Soo and seun Chas the quality of these may vary but if you think about it it's like these are the only things that people had like they would show these and people would gather around this tiny CRT TV at an anime convention just to watch some of these fandubs and now they've been replaced by some of their contemporaries such as AMV Hell which started in 2004 Yu-Gi-Oh bridged in 2006 and team fourstar in 2008 and it hurts me greatly to realize how old some of

1:01:13 these a Bridge series are some guy once said Nostalgia is a drug that causes us to misconstrue our memories and every day I don't rewatch Digimon the movie is a day I believe it was better than it actually was my original angle for this was the weight of this film its influence and the deeper meeting it had all along but it didn't have those things not necessarily like the real goal was about making it fun cool and profitable and because it wanted to do that it just laughed right in the face of authenticity changing so much that it became a brand new film and as Brian R puts it regarding the success of old shows like Voltron and Robotech by expanding the shows beyond the scope of the Japanese Originals the creators were able to create enduring objects you can't deny that something about Digimon

1:01:59 the movie has endured despite critics of the time believing it really sucked sabon tuned into that energy and did what worked transforming it into something brand new the English dub of Digimon just added something to the franchise that wasn't there before whether it's charm or a good soundtrack or whatever you want to think that it is but I think the real reason it endured was the fandom it's a show about digital creatures and making friends and going through some really hard stuff at a time when the internet was still this new place and a lot of people were going through some hard stuff all because of the things that they enjoyed so at the beginning I mentioned that Digimon was my favorite movie of all time and there are obviously my sentimental reasons for it I have memories of seeing this movie with my nana the year before she died as

1:02:44 well as I have my own original VHS tape that I had to fix recently cuz my VCR almost ate it it's a movie that makes me laugh it makes me urine from my childhood and think think harder about different things as I grow up I think about the missed opportunities I think about the background behind this production and it's like a whole second film is living here underneath the surface its true goal was to entertain a population that had never seen anything

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