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Digimon Adventure: Last Evolution Kizuna This movie can go gently caress right the gently caress off forever. I struggle to think of the last time I was so thoroughly disgusted with something I've watched. It probably doesn't help that I'm a Digimon lifer and so am one of those tedious people with OPINIONS on things, but I honestly find everything about this particular movie to be genuinely toxic and unpleasant to consider. It looks good, it was nice to see the 02 cast after Tri hit them with a truck, and the movie is at the very least a well put together and coherent in its theme and message, it's just that that message is dogshit. Without going into a point by point invective I will simply state that the message of the film is soul crushing in a way grotesquely antithetical to any other Digimon media I can name. In another series and from another perspective this movie would be seen as an obvious bad ending, the fate everyone gathers to fight against, but here in this movie we're supposed to see the entire cast inevitably losing their best friends as somehow not only natural but also GOOD. Because, as the series shows us via a character example, giving up on your friends for the sake of something you don't really care about and was imposed upon you by your family in direct defiance of everything that had previously been established about you is not character assassination, it is "maturity". No, seriously, that is quite literally where the movie goes, and no I don't know why Toei seems to just hate Sora. "Growing up means you shouldn't care about Digimon anymore" is a breathtaking pitch considering the franchise exists such as it does in large part on nostalgia on the part of its now adult fans. It's also a breathtaking pitch because of how far removed this is from literally any other Digimon series, even the really bad ones. So kudos on creating a movie that runs against every imaginable grain, and for bringing back a fascinating and underexplored setting in Digimon's mythology just to give it a death sentence. Double kudos for being so cowardly that the production had to go and preemptively confirm that the epilogue to 02 is still Canon even though it doesn't line up the movie at all, and triple kudos for actually making me stand behind said epilogue which I remind you has been hated near universally by fans for a good 20 years now. DA:LEK is in all imaginable ways the perfect Digimon movie for 2020. I look forward to this movie being relegated to the dustbin of history alongside peers like Eureka 7: Pocketful of Rainbows and Nadesico: Prince of Darkness. I'm not going to pretend the currently airing Digimon Adventure series is amazing, in fact it's quite bad in some respects, but at least it's not a depressing and stupid hot take of a thing. BNA The cast of this series deserved a better show to star in. I legitimately loved just about everyone in this series, the leads were great and had a genuinely great dynamic, the mayor was a cool character, the rival had a fascinating thing going on with her, and most of the one-off characters were just great and fun and interesting. And it was a Trigger show so of course it looked awesome. Meanwhile the show had no loving clue what it was doing. As was pointed out in this thread it is a BAD show about coexistence and multicultural racial harmony when one of the takeaways is that the cartoonish racists were actually completely correct about the minority stand-ins, but here we are. And I don't think something that jaw-droppingly appalling was the intended take away, which may be the most searing indictment against the show I can give. That the show ended up there happened I think because the show had no drat clue what was doing or what its metaphor was supposed to be, see all those early and middle episodes where the show is ambiguous about how good or bad a place anima-city is which a problem when the main narrative that finally arrives is about trying to protect it as some shining city on a hill. And I don't even mind the idea that a series should little bit of ambiguity over the merits of what people are fighting to protect (Yes, hello, I watch Gundam), it's just that the narrative is poisoned by that very ambiguity. When you use serious, ongoing, real world issues and messages and have proxies of real people in your metaphor and that metaphor can, by design, be applied to specific real populations of real people who do come under fire and are inflicted with real genuine harm, that you are performing without a net. If you want to try that particular act then I suggest you pay attention to BNA: don't fall and go splat like BNA does. BNA hit the third rail and started thrashing about wildly, but it hit it in the first place because it was already thrashing about wildly. And again, I love the hell out of this show's cast. If BNA had even the barest clue what it was doing with its story and its allegory I think it probably would be considered one of Trigger's greats. It didn't and it hadn't so it isn't. Wandering Witch So this didn't work. I was extremely here for the pitch, but the actual series of Wandering Witch was incredibly slapdash when it wasn't wholly incoherent. I never read the original novels, but the anime on its own was not a compelling ambassador. Broadly speaking the series had no control over its own tone, the stories varied WILDLY in quality, and the setting was curiously flat. It was probably a mistake for a travelogue series to play it as safe as it did, because the the world put forward by the series feels completely filled in. There was never a sense of adventure or of exploring the unknown or of seeing something wonderful or mysterious, Elaina obviously enjoys her travels but I never got a real feel of anything magical in the setting, ironic considering how many witches Elaina meets. Thus you have a show that mostly has placid, low stakes, largely comedic affairs in a world that seems designed for such gentle comedy and so it is jarring as hell when the series suddenly goes hyper dark out of the blue. Shout outs to episode nine which tries so hard to shock it's practically swimming in gore by the end, yet is so loud and the twist so obvious I actually started laughing when the bloody murders happened. So the series flits around with bad things occasionally happening around Elaina (but never to her, the show doesn't seem to have the guts for that) but mostly not, and if Elaina isn't around the show digresses to shrink the world by having a recurring cast of characters who show up all the time so it isn't even really about Elaina's travels. Shout-outs to Saya who is an incredible creep and the loving worst and nearly managed to ruin an entire otherwise okay episode just with a cameo in the epilogue. If there is a second season I would recommend not adapting any stories with her being that she's basically Elaina but an obsessive creepy stalker, and incidentally that's another problem: none of the characters really feel all that different from each other. I hope the novels are better because the anime was utterly disposable. Honorable Mention goes to Healin Good Precure for failing to put over its main cast and then promptly burying them for the new girl in such a way I completely lost interest. Most Avoided Interspecies Reviewers I didn't watch this show, but I did watch the backlash to the show and the backlash to the backlash to the show with some amusement. Never felt compelled to look at the actual series, though. Whatever poo poo Sword Art Online Anime Aired This Year No way. Once bitten, twice shy. A friend streamed SAO 2 a couple of years ago which fans seem to swear up and down was one of the best arcs of the series. It sucked immensely. My same friend has been watching it on Toonami and giving me "trip reports" which amount to angry screaming rants, so frankly I don't regret my decisions. Higurashi Gou I have no idea if this is actually bad, I was interested in watching a remake of Higurashi because I've never seen it and as a media phenomenon it passed me by entirely. I'll probably never get the original experience just because already know some of the big spoilers by osmosis, but I was willing to take a shot and try and put myself in the mindset of the first viewing. Thing is the show doesn't appear to be meant to be anyone's first viewing of this material. When it turned out it's not a reboot or remake but a distaff sequel/sidequel(?) naturally I dropped it because it's not what I wanted.
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Dec 30, 2020 19:22
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 08:07 |
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Endorph posted:wait isnt this how tamers ended, already Serious answer? No. I say that primarily because Tamers considered the kids separating from their digimon to be unequivocally a bad and sad thing. Takato is really sad that Guilmon is going away when they promised to be together forever, it's framed as a truly unfair and unjust thing that Impmon is going to be torn away from his partners after finally making amends with them and being forgiven by Juri, Jian's dad collapses going "oh god what have I done" for the small part he played in their separation (even though they had to in order to save the world) and it hurts him even more because his son forgives him for doing it, and then the series ends with the idea that the tamers and their digimon might reunite and that's treated as a good and joyous thing and framed as a chaser to the otherwise very bittersweet ending. DA:LEK, meanwhile, differs fundamentally by stating that the characters being separated from their partners is a normal thing because you're just going to outgrow Digimon, so get over yourself because if you don't like it you're just being a spoiled child and need to grow up. Again, in a franchise that's been coasting on nostalgia for at least a decade. According to the movie when a kid grows up and figures out what they want to do with their life their digimon partner disappears back to the Digital World and they will presumably never meet each other again and this is called maturity and it's good. Indeed, the villain's entire motivation in the movie is that she lost her partner due to this newly invented time limit thing and is going to insane degrees to try and stop this from ever happening to anyone else, and we're meant to understand she is wrong not only in her means but in her desired ends. By contrast, Sora, who gives up on her partner without a fight and refuses to lift a finger to try and help any of her other friends even while they are fighting for their lives to rescue thousands of people from around the world, is held up by the movie as a paragon who is more mature and better than anyone else. I point out again that this message is deeply at odds with any other Digimon work including in the details of the movie's direct prequels, and that's without getting into the bit where the movie's big dumb idea is inconsistent with ITSELF. tl;dr: Digimon Tamers recognized that tearing people away from their best friends for no reason other than some dude decided it should happen ought to be considered a BAD thing.
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Dec 30, 2020 22:50
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Justin_Brett posted:That movie sounds a bit like the Goofus of how to make something targeted at older fans while Cyber Sleuth is the Gallant. You are incredibly not wrong about this.
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Jan 5, 2021 18:47
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