You Can (Not) Remake: Digimon Adventure (2020), Part 1

Hello, everyone. Welcome back.

As indicated at the end of last week’s post, we’re taking a brief break from Missed the Mark for this week and the next.  I’m taking some time off for my birthday. We’re continue the episode-by-episode rewrite of Obi-Wan Kenobi on October 31st.  However, I did promise weekly uploads throughout the length of the Kenobi rewrite, and I am here to deliver.

So, please, join me, as I tell you the about an anime I recently watched, and how it may just be (and I propose this without irony, sarcasm, or hyperbole) one of the best remakes of any media made in the modern era.

ENTERING ANOTHER WORLD

Digimon was a franchise that had a massive influence on me as a child.  While I would not say it single-handedly formed me as a storyteller – I grew up in the era of Harry Potter, the Star Wars prequels, and the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films, after all – it left an undeniable influence upon me.

For those not in the know, Digimon is a multimedia franchise that originally sprang up to market digital pet toys.  It is not, contrary to the name, a Pokémon clone (though the fact that came out during Pokémon’s initial wave of popularity no doubt helped them).  The core conceit of the franchise is that there is a parallel dimension to our own where all matter is formed of digital data. The “Digimon” are, as the name implies, Digital Monsters that inhabit this world. 

Each Digimon TV show (which were marketed as seasons of one show in the United States, despite most being isolated in their own continuities) generally follows the same outline.  A group of youngsters are given Digimon partners and tasked with saving the Digital World and/or the real world from evil Digimon and other malicious programs.  The children experience character growth throughout their adventures with their Digimon and end the series as more mature people.

I’m not going to claim that the Digimon TV shows are a must-see experience.  They were created to sell toys (among other products) to children, and this really showed in the finished products.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with having focus on a tight demographic and for a specific purpose – better to be honest with yourself about who you’re writing for than to produce generic sludge that no one wants – but it does mean that Digimon shows don’t have a lot to offer to more mature audiences.  Many aspects of the writing are also lacking, especially in the English dubs.  (If anyone who worked on the dubs is reading this, I appreciate everything you did for my childhood, yet I’m not going to pretend that the dub scripts aren’t full of cringe.)  Despite these issues, Digimon shows do have redeeming qualities, and there are some important lessons in storytelling that can be drawn from them.

On paper, the narrative structure of these shows is brilliant.  The reason that the kids are partnered with Digimon is that their imagination, willpower, and/or virtues (depending upon which show you’re watching) serves as an energy source that allows their partners to temporarily assume more powerful forms.  Character development for the kids enables them to rise to meet escalating challenges.  You can track milestones along a character’s arc by just looking up in which episodes their Digimon unlock new forms. It’s simple, yet very effective.

Another strength of the show is the characters, at least in the first few seasons.  Much like the plot, the characters could be quite simplistic, usually adhering to easily understood archetypes.  However, the ensemble within each show enabled a diverse collection of archetypes.  The Digimon are also full-fledged characters (albeit shallower and more static than the kids, existing primarily to support the development their human partners).  It is easy for kids to find at least one human character in the cast to root for, either because they personally relate to that character or because they really like the partner Digimon.

The very first Digimon show, Digimon Adventure (that’s Season 1, for those living in the States), encapsulates the potential of both the narrative structure and the characters.  The seven (later eight) Chosen Children have diverse personalities and perspectives.  Each child was associated with a specific virtue (Courage, Friendship, Love, Knowledge, Purity, Sincerity, Hope, and Light) and received character arcs and dedicated episodes that allowed them to shine.  Their arcs advanced at different rates, yet this ensured that a new heroic Digimon form was introduced every few episodes.  The show also had fun with episodes that partnered off different combinations of kids so that they could bounce off one another.  The result was a show that managed to feel fresh and engaging across most of its runtime.

(Also, as some of you may have noticed, I am going to be running with the original Japanese names for everyone.  Nothing against the naming choices made in the English dubs.  I just want to pick a standard and stick to it for the length of this analysis, and since I didn’t watch the dub for the show we’re here to talk about, it makes more sense to stick with what I did watch.)

REMAKE MADNESS

Toei Animation, the parent company who owns Digimon, is on a remake binge that’s every bit as fervent as Disney’s.  After seeing that there was money to be made in revivals of their Dragonball and Sailor Moon TV shows, they turned to Digimon.

Their first attempt came from 2015 to 2018 with the Digimon Adventure Tri film series.  These films followed the cast of Digimon Adventure in their high school years and forced the Chosen Children to deal with more mature conflicts that challenged the virtues they embodied.  What used to be fun monster adventures were tempered with collateral damage and painful (if impermanent) losses.

On paper, this seemed like a good idea.  In execution, the emotional drama messed with the pacing and eclipsed the fights, and it often came off as nothing but teen angst.  The story was also needlessly complicated.  So many threats were introduced that the Big Bad of the series had to be defeated off-screen by a third party, rather than by the heroes.

Toei didn’t give up.  In 2020, they remade Digimon Adventure directly.  While COVID did halt production, the series was ultimately completed in 2021, capping off the series at 67 episodes (roughly a quarter longer than most other Digimon shows).

I was drawn to the remake out of curiosity.  Having rewatched Digimon Adventure on Netflix back in 2017, I wasn’t expecting this reboot (which I will call Adventure 2020 going forward) to have phenomenal writing.  I just wanted to see what they’d do with it.  At most, I expected an inoffensive retread of the story arcs from Digimon Adventure.

I was blown away.

Adventure 2020 is far from perfect.  Many baffling decisions were made with regards to the narrative of the series as a whole, and I’m mixed about some of the decisions they made to reduce animation costs.  However, Adventure 2020 has successfully done what so many modern remakes fail to do: it preserved the soul of the original while justifying its own existence with a new story.  This should be the standard towards which future remakes of any modern IP should aspire.

Now, let’s get into why I feel so confident in making such a grandiose claim.  (There will be unmarked spoilers from here onwards.)

SOULS IN RESONANCE

A common criticism of remakes (and, more broadly, of fan service and callbacks in modern stories) is that they are superficial.  Familiar elements are recycled or changed in a manner that shows a distinct lack of understanding for why those elements worked in the original story.  This can take the form of assassinating characters, watering down plot beats, or undermining the foundation of the entire world; it might also manifest through new characters, themes, or commentary that were never meant to fit into the existing world and thus create dissonance.  These leave the impression that the creators behind the remake had a story they wanted to tell and cannibalized an established IP to exploit the existing audience rather than build a new audience.  The final result is a product that feels soulless.

Disney’s live-action remakes are a perfect example of this.  A few have been good, and I don’t personally find any of them to be irredeemable trash in isolation (though I’ve only seen the films that are widely considered to be the better ones, so perhaps I’m overly optimistic in my assessment).  The problem is that they repeatedly fail to grasp why the originals were beloved in the first place.  Plot elements, scenes, and sometimes entire chunks of dialogue are copied without the proper context to support them.  It doesn’t help that Disney wholeheartedly embraces pandering (or, to use the currently trending term, virtue signaling).  They smash elements into stories where those elements either don’t fit or in a manner that generates ripple effects through the rest of the story, making it impossible to enjoy them even if you agree with the message in question.

Take, for instance, Aladdin.  Disney wanted Robin Williams’s Genie.  Sadly, they were five years too late for that.  They selected Will Smith to replace Williams.  While I don’t have any issues with Smith’s performance in the scenes where he’s given original dialogue, every time he’s trying to imitate Williams, it just doesn’t work.  Then there was the effort to appeal to modern-day feminist movements by turning Jasmine into a Strong Female Character fighting against the patriarchy.  This is a concept that should have worked, yet because the writers didn’t think it through, the narrative actually makes a good case against Strong Female Characters.  Those of you who saw the film may recall that Jafar pointed out that Jasmine is too inexperienced to take the throne … and that the film never actually countered that argument.  (Her guilt tripping some guards who were already on her team does not count as political experience.)  The whole farce could have been avoided if the writers had respected that Jasmine was already a strong woman pushing back against the expectations of her society and her position.  They could have made smaller, more subtle changes to the character to reinforce the concept (maybe Jasmine is arguing against the suitors because she’s worried it would give their native lands too much influence over Agrabah, and she hopes to buy time to get the city into a stronger political position), or completely changed the context of her character to give her practical experience (perhaps she could have been the royal spymaster, and her meeting with Aladdin comes when she goes into the city to meet with a contact.  Maybe Aladdin is one of her contacts.  That could have been a fun twist on their dynamic).

Adventure 2020 doesn’t suffer from this soullessness.  It is very clear, from the first episode to the last, that the creators both understood and had a deep love of the source material.  Whether it’s the characters, the general spirit of the story, or the worldbuilding, everything is within the spirit of the original story, reflecting the old in its truest form and only making changes that would enhance that vision.

Characters

The eight Chosen Children within the show are easily identifiable as the same people from the original cartoon.  They have the same traits, undergo similar (though not identical) arcs, and interact with one another in familiar ways.  What’s more, the creators acknowledged the importance of character episodes.  While Taichi, the team’s de facto leader character, gets far more spotlight than in the past (to the point that he is basically the main character, a change I admittedly wasn’t happy with), everyone got a few episodes in which they could personally shine.  You could easily cut episodes out of Adventure 2020 and either integrate them directly into Digimon Adventure or use them as the foundation for a second season (between Digimon Adventure and Digimon Adventure 02), all because the character work is so on-point.

I think this faithful adherence to the core identities of the character is most evident in the Chosen Child who had the most potential to go horribly wrong: Mimi.

Whereas most of the Chosen Children have one or two recognizable flaws. Mimi has a laundry list.  She is arrogant, vain, selfish, materialistic, spoiled, narcissistic, loud-mouthed, brash, and emotionally manipulative (some of those may sound repetitive, but trust me, they all needed to be listed), and she forces her will onto others without any consideration of their wants or feelings.  If you think that she sounds insufferable, Digimon Adventure Tri agrees with you.  16-year-old Mimi receives two verbal smackdowns in the second Tri film because of the trouble she causes others.  These aren’t just people getting irritated at her due to clashes of personality, either.  Her headlong rush into a battle without regard for bystanders leads to a helicopter being shot down, nearly killing the four people.

What offsets this laundry list of flaws is the virtue Mimi embodies: Purity.  Mimi never intends to hurt anyone with her behavior.  Everything she does is with the firm belief that everyone will either agree with her or ultimately benefit from her decisions, and every comment she makes is merely the result of her being honest about how she feels.  Sometimes she takes things too far, and she learns hard lessons about limits and thinking of others because of it, but every time, she makes the changes needed.  At her core, Mimi genuinely cares more about others than herself.

It would have been so easy to mess up Mimi in Adventure 2020.  The creators could have scrubbed her flaws, thereby diminishing her character arc.  They could have gone the other way and made her nearly irredeemable from the outset.  Instead, they preserved the essence of the character.  Mimi’s flaws and her innocence are on display from the moment she first appears on screen.  The only significant change made was the inclusion of her grandfather as a background character.  From her intro episode, we learn that Mimi’s grandfather is a CEO of a major electronics company, and that he possesses an immense sense of personal responsibility towards both society and the people working under him.  Mimi reveres her grandfather and wants to follow his example.  It’s just she lacks the wisdom to do it in a manner that won’t aggravate people around her.

The brilliant character work of the remake doesn’t stop with Mimi.  The show also takes time to give arcs to characters who didn’t get them in the original show.  Hikari was more of a MacGuffin than a character in Digimon Adventure; in Adventure 2020, she gets two episodes that focus entirely upon her (including one that provides more context to what exactly Light is supposed to mean as a virtue).  Her Digimon partner, Tailmon, gets a two-episode arc as well.  There are multiple episodes exploring the personal connection between Angemon and Devimon, something that past shows hinted at but never invested the time to actually explore.

Characters are the core of a story.  Even with a perfect plot and flawless worldbuilding, bad character writing (or even just characters that don’t resemble their former selves) can ruin everything.  The creators of Adventure 2020 understand this, and every change they made accounted for the ripple effect of that change upon the characters and the story around them.  Take notes, Disney.

Narrative

As mentioned above, Digimon Adventure had a very basic narrative structure.  The Chosen Children were brought to the Digital World to battle evil, and their character growth empowered their Digimon Partners to battle greater threats over time.  Adventure 2020 didn’t deviate from the formula.  When you only have 19 or 20 minutes of useable runtime per episode, and you need to spend a decent chunk of that on exciting and satisfying monster battles, a simple plot is a safe plot.  The formula wasn’t broken, so the creators didn’t try to fix it.

Lore

The original Digimon Adventure was very much building the setting from the ground up.  At the time of its release, it only had one manga series and the digital toys themselves to serve as a baseline.  More than 20 years of lore have accumulated since then.  As one might expect for a multimedia franchise with multiple different continuities, this lore is incredibly complicated, and what rings true in one TV show or game might not apply to another, yet there are certain trends and expectations.  Anything named “Greymon” is usually associated with fire, Celestial Digimon are cute animals in their base forms and awe-inspiring angels in their more powerful ones, and any character named Leomon has the same odds of surviving a story as Sean Bean would.

The creators of Adventure 2020 had no reason to feel beholden to anything that wasn’t in Digimon Adventure itself.  They were remaking the original story.  They had the perfect excuse to dismiss any lore than came after.  Alternatively, they could do what Rian Johnson did with the Holdo Maneuver, and fundamentally shatter the rules of the universe just to insert a moment of spectacle.

I can hardly claim to be an expert on the lore of Digimon.  However, based upon my experiences with this franchise, I can’t see any evidence that the creators did anything but respect and reinforce the lore.  Iconic heroes stayed good, iconic heroes stayed bad, and the rules of the monster transformations were upheld.  They changed the nature of the Crests (physical embodiments of the Chosen Children’s virtues) and more explicitly linked the Digimon transformations to the willpower and virtue of the kids, but these didn’t change the feel or functionality of the world.

The creators also took advantage of lore created after Digimon Adventure.  They made Omegamon and the Celestial Digimon into core elements of the story.  Furthermore, they had fun with some of the alternative transformations found in other shows and games, resulting in some interesting one-off episodes.  (This is probably a good time to note that at least one person of the creative team clearly loved Digimon Frontier, the fourth season from the US perspective.  Several Digimon introduced within that show served prominent roles in this one.  They even went so far as to bring back Lopmon, who was one of the Celestial Digimon from Frontier, to serve as a Yoda-like mentor figure for the Chosen Children in this continuity.)  This was a project made by people who were truly passionate for this franchise, not merely clinging to something because it was popular and provided a pre-existing fan base.

A STORY WORTH TELLING

I’ve been gushing about this remake for more than 3,000 words now.  Now’s as good a time as any to take a break.

Don’t worry, though.  Part 2 is on the way.  Next week, we’ll dive into the other big issue that plagues remakes – whether there was any point to do a remake in the first place – and how Adventure 2020 smashes through that barrier.  I hope to see you all there.