You Can (Not) Remake: Digimon Adventure (2020), Part 2

Welcome back, everyone.  Today, we will continue to explore how a niche piece of children’s animation has successfully nailed what it means to be a great remake.  Once more, we are diving into the success story that is Digimon Adventure 2020.

Please feel free to pop back to Part 1 for general background information for the franchise and how Adventure 2020 successfully recaptures the essence of Digimon Adventure through character work, worldbuilding, and preserving the formula of the story.  Alternatively, if you are checking in for Part 7 of the Obi-Wan Kenobi rewrite series, we will be resuming that next week.

With all that settled, let’s talk about how Adventure 2020 justifies its own existence where so many remakes fail to do so.  I must emphasize that heavy spoilers will be shared from here on out.  If you are seriously interested in watching this show, go do that before reading onward.

A STORY WORTH TELLING

Adherence to the soul of the original story is very important with a remake.  However, the original story is almost certainly still accessible, especially in our modern era of digital streaming.  This can lead consumers of a remake to ask a very simple straightforward question: “Why does this exist?”

Again, this criticism is commonly leveled against Disney.  As much as a shot-for-shot remake of an animated film in live action can makes for great spectacle, you can just as easily watch the original animated film.  This is especially true with Disney remakes.  They’ve now uploaded almost all of their content to Disney+.  Many of the people who might care about the remake will already have access to the streaming service, so it won’t be hard for them to notice that the remake isn’t offering anything new (that doesn’t clash with the things that made the original work, at least, as covered in Part 1).

A remake needs to offer audiences something that the original didn’t.  Many remakes try to fill this void with new actors and better special effects.  This works to an extent.  However, it can’t support a story on its own, especially since special effects age much faster than writing.

(Adventure 2020 does have better special effects than Digimon Adventure.  Animation has come a long, long way in 20 years.  As much as I adore hand-drawn animation, I can’t deny that digital animation (that’s 2-D animation created within a digital medium, not CGI) has reached a stage where TV show budgets can produce projects that look almost as good as big-budget Disney Renaissance films.  This is an enormous boon to an action-heavy franchise like Digimon.  The fights in Adventure 2020 are more dynamic and energetic than in Digimon Adventure, and they often manage to capture a sense of scale that the animation of Digimon Adventure simply couldn’t.)

The established audience created by the original needs a reason to show up for the remake, especially if they’re going to be asked to sit through 67 episodes.  As with preserving the essence of the original, the creators of Adventure 2020 knocked this out of the park.  Two very important decisions were made: the show was modernized, and a new story was built around the core of the original narrative.

It’s 2020

While this may seem incredibly obvious, I still think it’s a point that deserves recognition.

Modernizing a story isn’t just about updating the dialogue, changing the technology characters us, and ramming in modern sociopolitical messaging.  It’s about looking at every element of a story and understanding how the context of the modern world differs from the world in which the original took place.  Adjustments are then made so that the timeless elements that made the story worth remaking in the first place will faithfully translate into this new setting.

(Also, given that this is the second time I’ve brought up sociopolitical messaging in this series, I do want to emphasize that messaging itself is not a bad thing.  I stand by what I said in my Falcon and the Winter Soldier series.  The problem with adding messaging to a remake is that you potentially crowbarring in a message that the original narrative was never meant to support, which can make your ‘modern reimagining’ of a story timeless enough to remake feel dated.)

Modernization is an especially important consideration with Digimon.  The influence of digital networks over our lives has grown exponentially in the past 20 years.  There are now very few elements of modern life, especially in Japan and the West, that aren’t intimately entwined with digital networks in some way.  It wouldn’t be enough to simply give all the kids smartphones and replace Koushiro’s laptop with a touchscreen tablet (though Adventure 2020 did do both).  The increased dependence on digital technology demanded recognition.

So the creators of Adventure 2020 went all in.

The plot for the first half of this show is driven by villainous Digimon launching cyberattacks against the real world. Unleashing blackouts across Tokyo, hijacking cargo ships across the world by hacking their navigation systems, dropping the International Space Station out of the orbit by crashing satellites into it … They even blew up a NASA rocket on its launchpad.  In keeping with the franchise lore, the attacks weren’t even the villains’ primary objective.  What they really wanted was to harvest the massive amounts of data from social networks and news sites as people reacted to these events.  At a few points in the series, the Chosen Children need to stop a cyberattack while simultaneously battling a Digimon who was feeding off the harvested data.

Sadly, this element was dropped around the midpoint of the series.  I can’t help but wonder if COVID has something to do with this, either because it was hard for the creators to justify not mentioning COVID, or else because they wanted to provide audiences with more escapism and less fear.  Whatever the reason, that first half still cemented the series as a story that is very much grounded in our present time.  It couldn’t exist in the late 90s.

(I must acknowledge that the film Our War Game was set in the year 2000, so Digimon does have a precedent for stories based around cyberattacks.  Adventure 2020 also acknowledges this.  The first three episodes of the show are effectively a TV remake of Our War Game, recycling the film’s plot as an exciting introductory story arc.  My point is that more than 30 episodes of television were built around fleshing out this concept, and the fallout from those episodes ripples forward to the finale, rather than the cyberattacks being a self-contained narrative about a lone Digimon battling against just half of the Chosen Children.)

A New Story

As mentioned in part, the original Digimon Adventure had a very straightforward narrative structure.  The Chosen Children got Digimon partners and were tasked with battling evil Digimon, both to save the Digital World and the real world.  Adventure 2020 did not deviate from this formula.  However, it went in a vastly different direction for actual plot.

I personally divide Digimon Adventure into four story arcs:

-          The File Island arc, covering the first 13 episodes.  Kids travel to Digital World, meet Digimon, and liberate file island from the influence of Devimon.

-          The Dark Network arc, which covers 7 episodes.  The kids travel to the continent of Server and try to evade Etemon and his goons while serving for MacGuffins called the Crests, which will facilitate the transformation of their Digimon into a higher stage.

-          The Vamdemon arc, covering 19 episodes.  This starts with the kids reuniting after being scattered at the end of the Dark Network arc.  During this time, they begin to unlock their Crests.  They then learn that Vamdemon intends to invade the real world to destroy the eighth Chosen Child (who turns out to be Taichi’s little sister, Hikari).  The kids and their Digimon return to Japan to stop him, resulting in battles through the streets of Odaiba and the leveling of the Fuji Television Network building.

-          The Dark Masters arc, covering the remaining 15 episodes.  The Chosen Children return to the Digital World to destroy the four Dark Masters, ancient Digimon warlords who had seized control of the Digital World while the kids were in Odaiba.

There were pros and cons to this story.  It ultimately feels like a series of four smaller stories joined end to end than one cohesive narrative.  However, it worked well enough.  It’s doubtful the franchise would be alive 20 years down the line of this show hadn’t gotten kids invested enough to buy lots of Digimon merchandise.

Adventure 2020 could have recycled this plot beat for beat.  It certainly recycles pieces of it.  Devimon is presented as the main villain for the first 24 episodes.  The introduction of Hikari and her joining the team also gets a dedicated story arc.  However, Adventure 2020 ultimately chose to do its own thing with the material.  The result was an experience that, while still recognizable as a remake of Digimon Adventure, was different enough to give viewers something new.

The first big change was in how the characters were introduced to the show.  Digimon Adventure introduced every Chosen Child except Hikari in the first episode.  They are adventuring as a team from the very beginning.  Adventure 2020 takes things much more slowly.  It takes eight episodes to introduce and assemble just six of the Chosen Children, with Takeru and Hikari being the noticeable absences.  When Takeru and Hikari are added to the team, they are added individually, which each having an arc dedicated to saving them from danger and bringing them into the fold.  The full team of eight is also assembled before the halfway point of the series, rather than happening nearly 75% of the way through the show.

The second big change is the plot itself.  It has much more focus than the original.  There are side quests and character episodes, but from Episode 5 through Episode 67, there is a clear sense of direction, and the Chosen Children are constantly moving towards that end point.  The pace is uneven (perhaps as a result of the halt to production during COVID), but at least the story is always advancing from Point A to Point B (with the final arc arguably nudging them to a Point C that’s just a little farther along that same path).

The third big change is the villains.  Episode 5 establishes that the Chosen Children are being called to fight in a revived war between the forces of Light and Darkness.  The exact meaning of “Darkness” is unclear at first, but we understand from the beginning that the story’s not going to end when Devimon gets blasted into fragments of data.  Episode 31 finally gives a face to the Darkness: Millenniummon, a villain who was not in the original anime but did appear in some Japan-exclusive video games.  There are some familiar faces along the way – Etemon gets a one-off episode, as does Mugendramon of the Dark Masters – and the search from the Crests is recycled for the final arc to facilitate the final stage of the Chosen Children’s character arcs.  The overall story, though, remains focused on saving the Digital World from a single apocalyptic threat.

The final change, as mentioned in Part 1, is the greater role that the lore plays.  Part of the mission established in Episode 5 is that the Chosen Children need to find the last Celestial Digimon (the partners of Takeru and Hikari).  The arcs around these two characters allowed the show to more deeply explore the concept of who the Celestial Digimon are.  There is also the arc between Angemon and Devimon, exploring the conflict between Light and Darkness as it pertains to the Digimon franchise.  Omegamon received some attention as well.  He was still more of a Deux Ex Machina than a character, yet at least his initial appearances established him as a mysterious hero that Chosen Children could count on in time of next, and the last story arc built up to his arrival for the final clash with the series antagonist.

The end product of these changes is originality.  Adventure 2020 is a wholly different experience from Digimon Adventure.  This was a story worth telling, at least within the context of the Digimon franchise.  The only real downside to it being a remake is that this story would have made for a great sequel to the original show, allowing both stories to share the same continuity.

CONCLUSION

Many mistakes can be made with remakes in recent years.  Too often, these stories feel soulless, serving as cheap cash grabs and exploiting existing audiences.  Digimon Adventure 2020 rises above these flaws.

The show is far from perfect.  Breaking down the mistakes it makes would require a multi-part essay of its own.  There are even some elements where it falls short of the original Digimon Adventure.  On the whole, though, Adventure 2020 justifies its own existence with an original and engaging story while remaining faithful to the soul of the original.  If more remakes showed the same level of care and passion, perhaps the concept of remakes would not be viewed with the cynicism that it is today.

I want to thank you all for joining me on this journey.  I hope you enjoyed the more positive analysis.  Next week, we’ll dive right back into Missed the Mark: Obi-Wan Kenobi with Episode 5, “Masters and Apprentices”.  I hope to see you all there.