DIGIMON: THE MOVIE
Rated PG - Running Time: 1:22 - Released 10/6/00
I've seen some crappy kids' cartoon movies in my day, but I have
to say I have never been so appalled as I was trying to make sense
out of Digimon: The Movie, the latest release in the Japanese-originated-manufactured-cartoon-heroes-for-the-
purpose-of-selling-overpriced- merchandise-to-innocent-unsuspecting-kids-and-their-justifiably-annoyed-parents
category. If you thought Pokémon
was bad, this stuff will knock your socks off. A mass of technobabble
and loud noises "written" by Jeff Nimoy and Bob Buchholz
and "directed" by Mamoru Hosoda, Minoru Hosoda, and
Shigeyasu Yamauchi, the film tells the story of characters created
in the computer (hence "digital monsters"), and is patterned
stylistically after the craze started by Pikachu and his pals,
but the story is incomprehensibly stupid and the production values
vehemently soulless. Not only is the animation visibly jerky,
ugly, and unprofessional, about 50% of the words in the script
either begin with the prefix "digi-" or end with the
suffix "-mon," a phenomenon that seems intentionally
designed to produce a nervous breakdown among parents in the shortest
possible time.
Perhaps my personal dissatisfaction was caused by the fact
that from about halfway through the movie I was fighting desperately
to stay awake, but even the children in the audience at my showing
were running up and down the aisles toward the end, blissfully
unaware of the seizure-inducing events unfolding on the screen.
What ever happened to Bugs Bunny tying Elmer Fudd's shotgun barrel
into a bow? Now, that's cartoon entertainment.
The story, if you can call it that, which features the nearly
indistinguishable voices of Joshua Seth and Mona Marshall, comes
in three acts: first we have some Japanese kids who get a digimon
out of their computer (this apparently happens from time to time
in the "digi" world), and ultimately witness a huge
fight between it and another creature for no apparent reason.
Act two, arguably the most interesting and followable portion
of the film, has one creature living in the Internet, spreading
computer viruses all over the place and threatening to take complete
control, while our pre-pubescent heroes and their pixellated pals
fight to turn the situation around. The segment features a surrealistic
but visually interesting trip into cyberspace with some eye-pleasing
images. Act three involves some sort of major battle between good
and evil digimon, the result of which will determine the fate
of the world as we know it.
Apparently, the whole gimmick of Digimon is the concept that unlike Pokémon, these creatures "evolve" every so often (actually it's called "digi-volving"), turning into more and more powerful and menacing cyber-fighters, going through various levels with names like the rookie level, the champion level, and the ultimate level. This concept is primarily designed to sell the ridiculously expensive digimon cards (I've heard that some are priced upwards of $20 each), and not to make interesting or watchable stories. After all, if you've got a card with a certain digmon on it, you have to get all the various permutations of that character as he "digivolves," so you can impress your friends with the complete set. This Pokémon/Digimon phenomenon seems to have every American kid between the ages of 3 and 10 by the throat right now, and it's making money faster than they can print up the coveted cards, computer software, and other digi-merchandise. So one would think that the Japanese producers could afford production values to make a film like this more watchable. Guess again. *