Digimon: The Movie, Responsibility, & The Internet (or, lessons animation taught us)

0:06 While I don't consider animation to be a "kids' thing", the impact it can have and probably has had on many of our early lives is undeniable. It's an art form built around creating captivating worlds beyond imagination, full of lively and vibrant imagery, and whose characters stories and struggles help shape our understanding of the world around us. And recently (*), Mikey Newman of FilmJoy made a video about just that - "I think it's important we look at the media we consumed as younger people as adults to properly gauge what we should be carrying forward with us, and what we should, never show to children again" - and he asked anybody who's willing to make their own lessons animation taught us video, so I figured, why not? There are a lot of things I could probably talk about in this regard, from how Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy taught me that there's no such thing as a shortcut to success, how Courage the Cowardly Dog taught me to be brave in the face of

0:53 adversity, how Yu-gi-oh taught me that it's important to be both prepared and flexible, even Invader Zim showed me how, not to invade a planet. Lotta useful information in there. But there's one movie in particular that's always stuck in my mind as a classic, one that's had a much bigger influence on me than I think I ever realized and that, over time, has become oddly relevant and eerily poignant. And no, I'm not joking, I am talking about Digimon: The Movie For those who may not know, Digimon: The Movie is an animated feature released in the year 2000 and distributed by 20th Century Fox whose plot has to be described in three parts: the 1st section follows Tai and Kari Kamiya

1:39 after a digi-egg pops out of their computer and hatches a Digimon, and their efforts to deal with this anomaly; The 2nd section picks up the story four years later as Tai and his friends Izzy, Matt and TK do their best to defeat Digimon infected with a computer virus known as Diaboromon, before it destroys the Internet; the 3rd section jumps forward another four years and follows Willis, an American kid who also received a digiegg from his computer as he travels across America with Davis, Yolei and Cody to defeat another mysterious Digimon that's causing trouble by making people disappear into thin air. It's a convoluted story that's hard to describe succinctly because, despite its name, Digimon: The Movie isn't A movie . . . . . . it's three. You see, after seeing the success 4Kids and Nintendo had found with the release of the first 2 Pokemon movies, Fox wanted to try and replicate that with Digimon. However, Toei Animation, the studio that produced Digimon's animated

2:27 series, hadn't made any feature-length films for it at the time. But they did have a few short films: Digimon Adventure - not to be confused with the series of the same name - Digimon Adventure: Our War Game, and Digimon Adventure 2: Hurricane Landing!! Transcendent Evolution!! The Golden Digi- mentals - which I'll refer to as Hurricane Touchdown for brevity's sake, and just because that sounds badass - Fox used these three shorts to create a feature-length film for the franchise. Being 20, 40 and 60 minutes respectively, the shorts combined would have reached two hours, but Saban Entertainment, the company responsible for dubbing the movie, as well as the first three Digimon series, lacked the funding to produce a film that long and consequently had to make significant edits. Over 40 minutes of footage was cut, with Hurricane Touchdown losing about 30 minutes, half its run time, and believe me, it shows.

3:14 Davis: That is the saddest story, I've ever, heard . . . Willis: I'm the one with the problem, not you . . . get over it. Davis: Okay. Willis: That was fast. Unsurprisingly, upon release, Digimon: The Movie was critically panned. It got score of about 25% on Rotten Tomatoes, and 20/100 on Metacritic, and was described as "noisy", "ill-conceived", "predictable", and filled with "mediocre animation"? - Were they watching the same movie?! To be fair, it's not unwarranted. This movie has major problems. Its pacing and editing is all over the place. It blasts true of plot points faster than you have time to properly register, especially in the 3rd section, which takes such a nosedive in quality that it becomes a parody of itself, and it more often than not dips into Deus Ex Machina territory.

4:00 All the while, it dives into some of the most outlandish and over top nonsense you could only find in a movie from the late 90s and early 2000s. A giant dinosaur that shoots fireballs fights a giant parrot that shoots electricity out of its forehead. A demonic internet troll goes from eating up everyone's data and jamming phone lines to launching fucking nukes! And then there's this nightmare fuel of a floppy eared freak whose very presence is an LSD trip. Don't even get me started on the puns in one-liners. Izzy: Well, do you know what a semi-conductor is? Tai: A guy who works part-time on a train? Izzy: Never mind . . . It tries to have a bit of everything; action, drama, comedy, love triangles, plot twists, and even a few emotional roller coasters that, genuinely got me teary-eyed. This movie is all over the place, a lot of which I would argue simply comes down to the editing, as the original shorts, in comparison, are a lot more coherent and tonally consistent. But it's this sporadic nature that, I kind of

4:49 love about it. It's entirely possible I'm being blindsided by a nostalgia here, I will admit, but this film manages to lean into its own absurdity in such a way that's genuinely entertaining and engaging. But it's not all flashy 90s cheese as I do genuinely think there is a bit of substance to this film. I mean that's the whole point of this video. There are a lot of nice little life lessons scattered throughout its run time, such as how teamwork can figuratively and literally save the day, in multiple ways, how owning a pet is a big responsibility, how you shouldn't let petty arguments about something as small as, say, a hair clip, come between you and your friends, and if you pay attention in the 3rd section, that girls are just things for boys to fight over? Davis: What'd I tell you about kissing Kari, she's my girl! Kari: What do you mean, "your girl"? Davis: Oh, nothing just guy talk. Might wanna talk to your kids about that one. But most of all, there's

5:36 a strong underlying focus in the movie about responsibility. This is most obvious in the 1st section, which focuses on Tai doing his best to be a good older brother, an aspect of the story I can strongly relate to as at the time (*) I first saw this movie, I myself ended up with a little sister, and in many ways was shown how to be a good older sibling by this story. In it, Tai ends up being left to take care of Kari by himself after their mother goes out for a while. He makes Kari breakfast and tries (*) to keep her out of harm's way when their digiegg hatches into a Digimon named Koromon. Sure, he may not be a perfect role model, given how snarky can be, but he's a character wants the best for the people he cares about, and goes out of his way to look out for them, a point made even more interesting when you compare Tai's actions, to Koromon's. About halfway through the 1st section, Koromon ends up digivolving into a large dinosaur form. He hops out of their

6:23 bedroom window and starts exploring his new surroundings with Kari still clinging to his back. Though starting off innocently enough, as the sequence progresses, we quickly see just how much danger Koromon's exploration and subsequent path of destruction puts Kari in. Compared to Tai, Koromon comes across as simply uncaring, doing as he pleases without a second thought for how it will affect those around him. By contrasting Tai's caring nature with Koromon's destructive indifference, the film emphasizes the idea that a good older sibling, and a good person in general, should take into consideration how their actions will affect others, instead of simply acting on impulse and hurting everyone. But it also shows how messing up doesn't instantly make you a bad person either. In the 3rd section of the film, we learn how Willis, like Tai and Kari, also ended up receiving a digiegg from his computer, which hatched into the two digimon Kokomon - not to be confused with the aforementioned Koromon -

7:12 and Terriermon. He felt like he'd finally made some good friends because of them and tried to create another digiegg so he could have more friends, but this digiegg ended up getting infected with a virus and later transformed into Diaboromon. Luckily, Tai, Izzy and Matt were able to defeat it, but it quickly tract Willis down and infected Kokomon with its virus. Since then, Kokomon has been hunting Willis down and making everyone around him disappear. Realizing the danger this puts everyone in, Willis steps up and travels back to where Kokomon first got infected to try and undo the damage he's done. Willis has made a mistake, but rather than run away from or ignored the problem he's created, he instead decides to make up for it. He takes responsibility. For as disorganized as Digimon: The Movie may seem, it emphasizes how important it is to think about how your actions may affect the people around you and those you care

7:57 about, and how, if you make a mistake, you need to take responsibility for your actions. Essentially, it teaches kids that it's important, to be responsible. And looking back on my life, I'm honestly kind of shocked by how big an impact that lesson's had on the way I interact with the world and people around me. And it's something that I think a lot of kids could learn from, especially nowadays, where social media seems to give everyone free rein to be as much of a dickhead to each other as they want. Izzy: Your Digimon's a loser. Tai: What'd you say?! Izzy: How could 2 Mega-Level Digimon get beat by one lousy bug? WarGreymon quit like a coward. Izzy: OW! Tai: You take that back or I'll - ! And, intentionally or not, I think that's kind of the point. Time has this weird tendency to expose all the faults of a piece of media we may not have noticed when we originally

8:42 experienced it, and while that's definitely true for this film, it's also given it a chance to appreciate value over the years, one might say, specifically in how it portrays the Internet. It does its best to display the pros and cons of online life. It shows its ability to connect people from all over the world, whether they're talking to distant friends and family members, sending words of encouragement to Tai, Izzy, Matt and TK as they watch them fight Diaboromon, or, as shown before, shit-talking them for getting their asses kicked. It also shows its power to mess with our day-to-day lives without us even realizing, a point made even more relevant by the fact that the original Our War Game short portrays Diaboromon as more of a troll than anything else: messing with the main characters. stealing info, sending spam emails, jamming phone lines, and, the more I think about this, the more it starts to hit a little too close to home. For many nowadays, young people especially, a

9:30 considerable chunk of the people we know we've only been able to connect with thanks to the Internet, and with which we're also able to keep in touch with family members we only see in real life maybe once or twice a year, if we're lucky. It's also because of it we're able to get near limitless amounts of information and entertainment, and with which we've also been given the chance to educate and learn, to entertain, and to voice our opinions online - for better or for worse - we live in an age where our perception of reality is actively manipulated, both maliciously and unintentionally, because of hackers and trolls, our own assumptions and biases, and all the algorithms many different social media sites have set up to regulate the incomprehensibly vast amounts of information being uploaded to them every single second of every single minute of every single hour of every single day, and which ends up controlling

10:16 what information we consume and how we consume it, to the point that it's only been in the last few years we've realized just how powerful its unintentional ability to misinform really is! This movie warned us and we IGNORED it! I hesitate to say that Digimon: The Movie was ahead of its time, but it certainly managed to age well. I'd almost say it's a 90s movie that was made for the internet. Now, it's important to preface here that what I just described and am about to say probably was not the intent of the film, and is more than anything else just me stretching an interpretation, but when it's focused on the power of the Internet is taken into account with its theme of responsibility, one could argue that this film is trying to teach us how to be responsible, online. How we need to think about what we post and comment and how it affects those we interact with, and to admit when we've made a mistake

11:04 and to do better. It's an important lesson I think a lot of people, not even just kids, could learn from, given how toxic social media seems to have become - or, as some might say, always has been - Sure Digimon: The Movie is a flawed, but entertaining, film with a lot of problems, but if there's anything I've learned from researching and thinking too deeply about this particular animation, it's that as the years go by, it's one whose themes and ideas are becoming more and more relevant for the people, and especially the children, of this Internet age. And yeah, those are my thoughts. Admittedly, this video is kind of rambly and goes off-topic quite a bit, but everything about this movie is just such an experience, and I needed to talk about as much of it as I could. I wanna thank Mikey for starting this whole, challenge(?), I guess you could call it? It was fun to

11:51 try and it's given a lot of creators a chance to shine, and there are a lot of great videos made for this I would highly recommend checking out, if you have the time. Anyway, let me know what yous think, if yous agree, disagree, if you remember how radical the 90s were, what lessons you've learned from the animated films and shows you watched as a kid, etc, and thanks for watching! Be sure to check out my last video, where I talk about Hisone to Maso-tan, and why it's so fun to watch. Or, check out my breakdown of Darling in the FranXX, and its melodramatic relationship problems. And if yous enjoyed this and wanna see more, don't forget to like, comment, share and of course, Subscribe to Come Fly With Me! Yous can also follow me on Twitter for more updates about this channel and other stuff and hopefully, I'll see you later!