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What a contrast. At both of the Pokemon (hereafter referred to as P.) feature-length adventures, to get a seat I had to pepper-spray a bunch of kids whose irrational fanaticism left me feeling like I’d sat through (rats) a couple hours (rats) of Bush’s subliminal (rats) campaign commercials. But at this movie, based on a Japanese cartoon series which supposedly predates the P. craze, I was one of only three people in the audience at five o’clock on Friday afternoon. More surprising still, it turned out to be kind of fun to watch, and not just because the sparse crowd obviated mortal defense of my Milk Duds.
First of all, it was cool because a commercial ran for Buell motorcycles -- naked sportbikes that shoehorn a 1200 Harley Sportster motor into the smallest chassis possible – and I’d never seen a motorcycle advert on a big screen before. Then came a Fox Kids short that looked like it could have been done by Monte Python animator-turned-director Terry Gilliam. By the time the movie itself started I was in a surprisingly good mood.
Then – WHAM – out jump these visuals that appear to overlay the styles of three or four different honest-to-gonzo anime artists. There’s a little Japanese girl who communicates by blowing a whistle, and her Astroboy-haired brother who always wears goggles, and for some unexplained reason their desktop spawns a “digi-egg” that hatches into a rapidly evolving imp resembling a big disembodied Easter Bunny head with fangs. It mutates into a gigantic friendly dinosaur which reduces several city blocks to rubble in a kaiju skirmish with another, evil, digital monster. Segue to four years later, when there’s now a worldwide network of these silicon-sired pets who must unite and go into the Web, Tron-style, to fight a beastly virus that launches a couple ICBMs, like the evil computer in the underrated 1970 technothriller Colossus: The Forbin Project. Flash forward four more years, and the kids fly to America to help a fellow “digi-destined” combat a nightmare spawned at the start of the first segment.
Like the P. movies, Digimon takes the original cartoons, rewrites the scripts to include lots of silly jokes, and gives the monsters annoying childish voices. But somehow it’s all -- better. The series’ creators are obviously a web-savvy, artistically gifted bunch, lacing the story with various netaphors that younger children are not likely to get; they also appear to have enlisted sponsorship from the telecommunications and personal computer industries, judging by the ubiquitous presence of pagers, cellphones, PDAs, and laptops. It runs long, and gets too goofy at the end, but it still boasts some of the trippiest imagery since 2001 and a soundtrack full of last year’s hits from Fatboy Slim, Barenaked Ladies, Smash Mouth, and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones (not to mention the Tel Aviv Symphony Orchestra). Parents may find its bristling cyber-weaponry and PG-rated monster-on-monster violence overly hyper, but if you want to see the closest thing to a fireworks display available before New Year’s Eve, you might want to check it out. C+
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