Opened US f-6-oct-2000
Rated PG
82 minutes
20th Century Fox
Why, I wonder, whenever a TV show XYZ is ported to film, is it titled "XYZ: The Movie?" "The Transformers: The Movie." "Pokémon: The First Movie." "Star Trek: The Motion Picture." Do the adwriters fear "in theaters now!" will be misinterpreted, and the audience will go searching the UHF spectrum?
The film is preceded by "Angela Anaconda Goes to the Movies," a 10-minute short to which you'll respond: "enough with the boosterism; I've already *bought* the tickets." Angela is the school-age title character of the eponymous FoxKids/FoxFamily animated series, which resembles the paper-cut- out pastiches from "Monty Python." In the short, Angela and friends must evade the supercilious superiority of the school's bully-blonde, and a hated teacher's high hair, before they can watch the hotly-anticipated film.
Like other series-to-film adaptations, a little familiarity enhances the experience; but forget who-digivolves-to-what and "Digimon: The Movie" can be enjoyed just for the hilarious scripting and chimerical creatures.
No stirring oratory here; just off-the-cuff oneliners and the occasional heartfelt tirade. These are kids, not professional superheroes, and their suboptimal improvisations are played for max comedy. The juxtapositions arrive fast-and-furious, a general public oblivious to the Digimon combat transpiring just-around-the-corner. (Hmmm... they must be jaded after all those Godzilla attacks.)
Sure, I'm a grizzled veteran of hard-SF, but the travel-sized Digimon in their pre-Champion phases are irresistably cute. Where else will you find a talking rabbitoid with inflatable prehensile ears, as devoted to its human partner as one of Anne McCaffrey's Pernese dragons?
Ditto for the film's first act, chronicling Japan's first Digimon incursion. Tousle-haired young Tai Kamiya (inseparable from his trademark goggles, even then) frantically tries to hide a newly-hatched Digimon from Mom -- "we'll say it's a throw pillow." Little sister Kari merely thinks it's the greatest playmate ever, even when the gregarious bouncing pink head smooches them like a facehugger from the "Alien" films.
The second and third acts occur years later and involve the isolated Twelfth Digidestined, a boy named Willis in Colorado. The second is the most imaginative Digimon plot I've seen, involving a hybrid Digimon-virus on the internet. Apparently Izzy gets his Netscape Navigator plug-ins from the same place as the radio astronomers in "Cosmos" -- and the screenshots of Japanese-version Windows9x are quite amusing.
There's the requisite 50%-combat-by-weight, of course, with several new Digimon (many with a distinct "Evangelion" aesthetic) and additional digivolutionary phases. The film *does* look like an oversized TV episode, though, as the fat black outlines and recycled transformations attest. The CGI'd zero-g combat-within-the-internet is fairly impressive. The dozen songs in the soundtrack aren't particularly well-integrated with the plot.