I was definitely one of those kids that looked at Digimon and thought “that looks like a Pokemon ripoff” and just kind of ignored it. It’s not like I never saw any of the show, I did own a single VHS tape with a couple of episodes on it that I watched at least more than once, but there was definitely something missing for me. Cut to now, approaching my thirties, and my fellow-Pokemon-only partner and I thought to ourselves “shall we give Digimon a go?” Why we had that thought, I couldn’t tell you, but it did feel like something that was missing in our lives and we wanted to fill that gap.
The series is, unsurprisingly, very much a kids show. All of the characters and Digimon’s designs are very sellable, dialogue is a bit hammy, the music is incredibly late ’90s, early 2000s in vibes, and things like stats and types show up clearly on the screen so kids could easily see what their favourite guys could do. But, we didn’t actually start with the series, because we figured that if we’re going to do this, we should do it right. Which in turn led us to the Digimon movie.
No, don’t worry fervent Digimon fan, I’m not talking about the awful amalgamation of three different movies that barely makes any sense, I’m talking about the original one, Digimon Adventure. To the uninitiated, Digimon Adventure serves as a prologue to the main Digimon series, and released in cinemas the day before the TV show aired in Japan. It’s only a short little thing, about 20 minutes in length, and you know what? It’s kind of incredible – and also surprisingly scary.