Case 5: Treasure Planet vs. Titan A.E.

            So you like cartoons right?  Of course you do, you’re friends with me.  Remember when the medium almost died?  Twas the mid 2000s, you probably don’t remember it that way but it’s sort of obvious in retrospect if you’re a freak like I am who does nothing but read TV Tropes and Homestuck, giggle to himself, and write treatments for fantasy stories labeled “porn” so nobody suspects that you like fantasy.  Anyways, there was a severe lack of traditionally animated material in theaters at the time.  You might attribute that trend to the rise of Pixar, which had just begun its long, almost untarnished streak of success.  Yes, you think, after that Disney started making mostly CG films until The Princess and the Frog, years later.  And after the success of Shrek, Dreamworks has made nothing but CG films.  But a new medium does not simply replace an old one, unless people begin to think of it as inherently superior.  People still read books even though Kindles exist for example, because the print medium has many advantages over virtual reading (it’s not stupid, for example). 

            So what’s the reason for the decline in traditional animation?  Disney was just coming off an entire decade of critical successes, like they’d just rolled all the best numbers on their collectible bloodstone D20s.  All of them.  Every movie they’d made between The Little Mermaid and Tarzan was an epic win.  But quick!  Tell me what movie comes after Tarzan in the Disney Animated Canon?  You can’t can you?  You pitiful child: #38 Fantasia 2000, #39 Dinosaur, #40 The Emperor’s New Groove, #41 Atlantis: The Lost Empire, #42 Lilo and Stitch, and #43 Treasure Planet.  Now, there’s nothing wrong with any of those movies, I certainly like them, but damn it’s like they were made by a completely different company.  Can you really fit New Groove into the same canon as Beauty and the Beast?  If, in some alternate universe they had in fact been made by two distinct companies, and you wrote a fanfiction crossover about those characters, people would accuse you of smoking Toasty, the crazy alternate universe version of crack, or something.  It’s no wonder you don’t remember them quite as well as The Lion King or some such. 

            You see, those six movies were released within three years of each other.  When Disney essentially saved animation with the advent of The Little Mermaid in ’89, they released one film a year until 1999, when they released both Tarzan and Fantasia 2000, and then they released two films a year until ‘03.  The reason that Tarzan is considered the last film of the Renaissance of animation is because Jane was smokin’ hot I mean because the next few films were radical departures in style or quality, the later at least in terms of ticket sales.  Disney had the same thoughts that you just did, that traditional animation was simply losing out to CG, despite the critical failure of Dinosaur.  Like, they rolled all ones on their collectible fluorite D8s, and one of them broke in half.  So, Disney decided to risk it all on one last attempt at their classic style, in the traditional animation method.  They pulled out their lucky collectible lignum vitae D12 that they’d had blessed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, had Jane blow on it sensually, closed their eyes, and made a saving throw.  Now name the next three movies after Treasure Planet.  Let me guess; something, something, and Chicken Little.  The die had somehow manifested a thirteenth side, bearing a 0.  That was beyond a critical failure.  That was taking more damage than if you’d opted not to cast the die at all.  So it was that Disney renounced traditional animation.

            But why did Treasure Planet do so badly?  It’s a good movie I swear!  And so may some of you.  Let me tell you why—but first let me tell you about Don Bluth.  He may well be the least fortunate man in movies, seeing as his work is consistently mistaken for Disney.  To be fair, he got his start working on Sleeping Beauty and quit Disney during Pete’s Magic Dragon to start his own studio (thank you TV Tropes).  He made about a dozen films, most of which are classics.  The Secret of NIMH.  An American Tail.  The Land Before Time.  Anastasia (well I liked it!).  All Dogs Go To Heaven.  Though it’s alright to mistake that last one for a Disney movie seeing as the little girl basically IS Snow White.  But I digress.  In the later parts of his career, Bluth’s movies started becoming increasingly less successful, in my opinion due to lesser writing and poorly incorporated CG.  The last full length movie he ever made was called Titan A.E.  I remember seeing a trailer for it in a movie theater.  Once.  The movie was a space opera concerning the destruction of the planet Earth and the human race’s quest to find a new home, during which they come to be regarded as the homeless of the universe and treated with as much respect. 

            This movie came out at about the same time as Treasure Planet.  It’s ironic (or not??) that they’re both space movies because what happened reminds me of this picture of two galaxies that got too close and started cannibalizing each other.  The production of both films was plagued by the existence of the other film, and pressure to be the better of the two, and much cloak and dagger spying bullshit went on, whereby both films ended up copying each other’s plot points and characterizations.  They’re both very different movies, and yet—TV Tropes says it best:

“Fatherless boy tries to solve his daddy issues by going on a space voyage in search of a long-lost treasure, hidden on a Big Dumb Object, with a less-than-stellar crew of galactic Petting Zoo People, one of whom is a Parental Substitute, but proves to be The Mole, using a starmap only he can read. The villain redeems himself in a Take My Hand moment while trying to activate/deactivate the forgotten Doomsday Device. Both films were deliberately marketed to single-parent Gen-X kids, with an uplifting Grunge soundtrack. One is about Pirates in a Steam Punk Alternate Universe, based on a classic novel. The other is about Space Pirates After the End, inspired by Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. Both films got an Earth-Shattering Kaboom.” 

Don’t click any of that.  Mind you, the goals of the two movies are wildly disparate.  Treasure Planet is of course about finding a planet full of treasure.  Titan is about a ragtag bunch of misfits trying to find a lost spaceship named the Titan which is supposedly the last hope for humanity after the destruction of Earth.  Its purpose is to actually build an entirely new planet in an incredible scene where it absorbs all of the surrounding material, a magnificent planetary ring of ice! 

            Now, to the part of the essay that you slogged through several pages for: the penis jokes.  By which I mean the actual analysis, as opposed to useless background information.  I bet you know who my favorite troll is!

            Let’s talk first about the setting.  I’m going to say right off the bat that of the two movies, Treasure Planet has the better setting.  The quote up there says “steam punk”, but I’m sure that it’s for lack of a better term.  There’s nothing really like what Treasure Planet’s setting is, at least of all the things I’ve seen.  Maybe something out of a JRPG has come close, but there’s not really a word for that either due to the game industry’s equating gameplay with genre.  But that’s a tangent.  What I mean is that there’s nothing that really looks like its steam powered in the movie, except perhaps the Montressor police robots.  What’s more, everything’s based on Enlightenment era aesthetics and science, rather than Victorian era.  People wear colorful tail coats, tricorne hats, and ruffled cuffs.  The guns look like old flintlock pistols, but they have a cylinder like a revolver that carries laser charges instead of bullets.  The spaceships are actual ships, proud old galleons and pirate ships, which sail on “luminiferous aether”, based on a late 18^th century idea that light required a medium to travel through, explaining why the spaceships are exposed to empty space: it’s not empty.  Essentially, the setting is a seamless mishmash of classical aesthetics and culture with futuristic technology that really just makes your eyes pop.  Even the most vocal critics of the movie all agree that it looks fantastic.

            Titan A.E. had a good setting too though.  It really tried to convey the whole “used future” aesthetic started with Star Wars.  There is definitely something of Star Wars in the look of the movie; it looks like a world in which people actually lived.  That said, it’s just not as iconic.  In a really good space opera, you always remember what the ship looks like.  The X-Wing, The Millennium Falcon, The Enterprise, Serenity, the galleys from Treasure Planet.  With this movie, I can remember what the ship was called, The Valkyrie, but it just looks so generic that I don’t even have a general idea of what it looks like.  Boxy?  Maybe.  They had some really creative designs in other areas though.  Planet Sesharrim is a beautiful red world covered in water, with huge “hydrogen trees” that look like organic hot air balloons.  It’s inhabited by my favorite part of the movie, the Gaoul, the parasitic aliens from Stargate SG1—I mean a race of flying humanoids.  They’re dark red and scary looking amalgamations of bat, pterosaur, and vulture, they communicate in grunts and gestures, and they’re totally friendly and badass.  They’re only in the movie for a little bit though, which is a shame.  The next best looking scene in the film is when Cale, our protagonist, is allowed to fly the Valkyrie through a big beautiful nebula while huge flying aliens called angels bask in the ship’s wake.  It’s just damn beautiful, but I think it went on too long.  All the same, A.E. loses because of the poorly integrated CG.  As cool as the design of that planet was, the execution failed.

            Speaking of the aliens, I’d say A.E. had the more creative designs while TP had the better looking ones.  The aliens in A.E. felt more, well, alien,  they looked weird and had all these strange fleshy bits, they ate strange foods that the humans couldn’t quite stomach, but a lot of them were just ugly and sort of forgettable, except for the crewmen and the Gaoul.  The creatures in TP were largely animal folk; our captain was a cat lady, the doctor was a dog, Silver was a cougar (?), etc.  They had human names and human mannerisms, and the only ones that didn’t were basically side characters, with the exception of the monstrous crewman that terrorizes Jim throughout the voyage.  This has led me to believe that the main characters aren’t really aliens but new species created by biotechnology experiments, but it’s not really relevant.  In contrast, the alieness of the aliens in A.E. is played up to really drive home the homelessness of the human population.  There is an amazing scene, written by Joss Whedon no less, where the crew tries to rescue one of their members from an alien jail by disguising themselves as alien slavers, but the guard pokes all kinds of holes in the charade about their posture and mannerisms, concluding that they’re up to no good, and the crew has to resort to violence.  But the ones in TP looked good, so nyeh.  A thought occurs: there is an alien in TP that communicates in farts.  No matter how good or deep a movie is, if it’s marketed to children, there will be a single flatulence joke that will be the only part the kids remember.  I still recall the chorus of my nieces and nephews proclaiming their butts to contain machine guns after Astro Boy, but that’s another tale.

            Holy shit we’re almost on the fifth page now.  Most of you have gotten bored and wandered off by now so let’s take a break (loosens tie).  What’d you do this Christmas?  Tradition at my house says we have a big potluck and exchange gifts at midnight.  I stayed up until two to watch my Rankin/Bass Christmas DVDs, my present to myself.  I woke up real late on Christmas day and started reading Game of Thrones, which had been languishing in a shopping bag for over a year.  Fuck, what am I even talking about?

            I suppose we should get on with the characters.  Both films, as has been made obvious, feature the dynamic between a mechanically inclined fatherless punk with a heart of gold and a gruff crewman.  We’ll start with the mechanically inclined punks, our protagonists.  Jim Hawkins is the main dude in TP.  He’s a sullen little shit with a bad haircut that learns to open up around other people by the end of the movie.  He certainly acts more disillusioned that Cale, the protagonist of A.E., who is a snarky jerk.  Of course, Cale is about twenty, and has had to deal with disparaging aliens his whole life, and had to develop a quick wit to survive, while Jim is in his early teens and lives in a comfortable home with his mother and can therefore afford to be antisocial.  That said, I think I like Jim just a bit more than the other kid.  He seems more sincere and therefore a bit more likable, but I wouldn’t say that there’s anything very special about either of them, except that Cale is totally a blonde version of Dmitri from Anastasia, on whom my sister has a crush. Tangents!

            Now for the fatherly mentor crewman!  Silver, the obese cyborg cook, serves this role for Jim, while Korso, captain of the Valkyrie, is this for Cale.  Once again, TP wins out.  I try to be impartial when I do these jiggers, but Treasure Planet is clearly the superior film.  Not that A.E. is bad at all, except for those visuals I keep mentioning.  Let’s get back to what I was saying though.  It’s clear from the beginning that Silver is going to betray the crew, TP being an adaptation of Treasure Island and therefore everyone should know the damn story by now, so Silver’s friendship and mentoring of Jim is reluctant, but the two of them clearly need each other.  Since his motivation is to steal the treasure when they finally find it, he’s very much not there to make friends.  Korso’s friendship seems more genuine at first since we don’t know that he’s planning to betray Cale, but it becomes quite obvious after the somewhat tacked on seeming scene where he loudly declares his intentions to sell out Cale to his superiors in a private conversation.  By the way, his superiors are the aliens that blew up earth, so fuck this guy.  The essential difference between the two characters is that Silver is basically a good man (cat?) with badness in him while Korso is a bad man with goodness in him.  I think Korso’s betrayal is more painful because it was completely unexpected (at least by me), and his return at the end of the film to the side of good was more emotionally fulfilling, because he actually had to make a moral choice, humanity or himself.  Silver chose Jim over the treasure at the climax, but that was because he legitimately valued their friendship, and the also the planet was exploding.  All that said, Silver is just the better character.

            I suppose it’s to the credit of the film-makers that the casts of characters don’t line up that perfectly, so I’ll just briefly go over the supporting characters, although their places in the film don’t exactly correspond.  Let’s see…Preed!  He’s a jackass alien pervert and part of the crew of the Valkyrie.  At the end of the film, he actually betrays Korso so he can get a bigger cut.  The Korso snaps his neck like it’s not even a thing.  Badass.  It’s established throughout the film that Preed’s a bloodthirsty monster with delusions of eloquence, and probably even the dumbest of viewers guessed that he’d be the one to betray the crew—making it all the more surprising that he and Korso are in cahoots.  Anyways, he kinda sorta looks like an evil version of—

            Dr. Delbert Doppler!  The good doctor is a kind soul with a somewhat funny voice.  He’s technically the leader of the expedition to find Treasure Planet, since it was his idea and he funded the thing, but he does very little leading.  He’s also a crack shot with a flintlaser as I suddenly decided to call them.  Best scene: he shoots his gun and it looks like it missed, but it actually hit some loose junk, causing it to fall on the pursuing pirates, knocking them into space!  Captain Amelia asks if he was actually aiming for it and he assures us that he was.  Crack.  Shot.  That said, he also speaks the fart language (he’s not very good at it though), losing him about twenty cool points.  He’s not really as important to the plot as Preed was, though he’s definitely more likable.  And he hooks up with the captain later, so that’s a plus.  Speaking of badass female crewmen:

            Akima!  Cale’s love interest and fellow human.  I’ma just go ahead and say that she is a very attractive Asian woman.  She’s also much more optimistic than Cale despite having been worse off before joining the crew (mind you, no human had it easy without the Earth, there are just degrees of suckiness), and is just as proficient with machinery as he is, and a better fighter.  Seriously I don’t think Cale even picks up a weapon the whole movie, despite what the trailers may show.  The two have a sort of slap-slap-kiss relationship, though Cale is the tsundere.  Fuck, the people who don’t read lots of TV Tropes and manga didn’t understand that at all.  Best scene: Cale takes her to a healer after she’s injured by Korso, and the lady tells someone to bring her some whiskey.  Cale asks if it’s for the wound and she says it’s for him; he looks like it’s about to pass out!  D’aww, they really do like each other.

            Captain Amelia!  She’s more of a badass than Akima.  She’s the captain of her own ship!  Which she parkours all over using her badass cat-lady powers!  And her crew is composed of horrible monsters!  You just know that the only reason they had the gall to mutiny against Amelia is because they were being led by an even bigger badass: Silver.  I suppose all this makes her a better role model for the little girls than Akima too, but I don’t actually care about those sorts of things.  That said, I think Akima is actually the better character of the two; she just does more things by the end of the film.  Amelia also does not get a shower scene, so ha.

            Oh yeah, Amelia also has babies with Doppler.  Which is weird, considering he’s a dog and she’s a cat.

            Fuck, it’s almost the end of the article and I still haven’t established a running gag!  I think the previous one didn’t have a running gag either.  Shit.  Maybe I’ll just use my meta-running gag of mentioning something and describing it, then simply concluding with “I liked that one”.  Nah, I want a proper running gag.  Let’s see.  Um, I did make a bunch of dice metaphors earlier, but I think I used them all too early for it to count.  Oh I know!  You know Jane from Tarzan?  She’s hot.  Two birds, one stone.  Actually, now I think of it, I did point out a lot of the times I went off on a tangent…um, of which this is one?  Shit just got meta yo.

            Oh wait, damn it, I’m getting ready to finish and there’s still the matter of the “bigger bad” as TV Tropes would have you say; the villain behind the villain.  The whole plot of Titan is set off by the Drej, a race of energy beings.  They felt threatened by humanity’s development, because Humanity Is Special and Most Writers Are Human, so they blew up the Earth.  Now, they hunt the surviving humans, but more importantly they hunt the Titan, because they actually know what it can do.  They’re actually a pretty cool concept, with their eerie blue spaceships and their insectoid, blue energy bodies, but unfortunately they are completely made up of that poorly executed CG in nearly every shot.  The creators of the film have said that this was done intentionally to make them look more wrong and out of place, as if they came from some other dimension, but I’m not buying it, guy, you’re just trying to make up for subpar effects.  Anyway, they do finally find the Titan thanks to Korso’s betrayal, but Cale and Akima rig the thing to absorb their energy to power the planet building scene of awesomeness!  That’s pretty badass, and it destroyed the—one Drej ship?  Was…that all of them?  ‘Cause, if not, the rest of them probably know where planet Bob is (dammit Cale), and unless only that specific ship was armed with the planet smashing weapon, then you’re out of a planet again bud!

            Captain Flint, the legendary pirate whose treasure is up for grabs in TP, is not quite really in the same category, but he is the cause of the story, and is really badass to boot, so I’ll mention him here.  He built (or found apparently, according to the official art book of all things) some very advanced technology, such as a portal generator, which allowed him to strike anywhere in the galaxy at any time, making him the most powerful and wealthy pirate ever.  It also led to an artificial goddamned planet just to store all of his bling!  Dude was a pimp.  He also rigged the thing to melt down and explode in a spectacular fashion in case anyone ever found it, destroying the wealth of entire civilizations with it, presumably as a final fuck you to the universe that did not allow such a badass to live forever.  He’s basically the opposite of Gold Roger from One Piece if you think about it.

            I don’t think I do conclusions any more.  I guess this is the really meta episode?  Also the one where I say “meta” most often, meta.  Anyways, watch both of these movies, but you’ll prefer Treasure Planet.  Maybe if you do, Don Bluth will make things again?  We can only hope….

I’m gonna break the mold and not have this article end on a stinger.  Oh wait….

Case 4: Pokemon vs. Digimon

            This episode of Pop-Culture Attorney is dedicated to my sister, who has adamantly refused to read any of my previous work, despite the fact that I am always reading her awful bullshit grad-school papers and trying to make them resemble logical thought.  I feel free to voice these opinions here because even if she did read my other stuff, she’d never touch this:  Pokémon and Digimon.

            Right, I am a major fan of Pokémon.  Those of you who are my personal friends may remember not reading my various statuses relating to times that I’ve made a particularly epic capture, or the time my Azuril ScaryJane came out of the closet as being transgendered (that wasn’t a joke by the way, she actually evolved into a male Pokémon).  Funnily enough, I never had a portable system growing up, so while lots of people out there equate the games with their childhood, I got my first Pokémon game when I was 18, and only then because I was feeling particularly nostalgic.  It was the remake of Pokémon Silver, one of the old-school games, and I suppose I was one of those “genwunners” that only liked the older stuff at the time.  I had gone through a long period of time where I didn’t like Pokémon at all, because the show had started, in my opinion, to degenerate in quality a bit after they replaced Misty with May.  I don’t blame May, I blame lazy writing.  But we’ll get to that.

            The worst part of the Pokémon fandom is the genwunners.  They assure us that the only good games in the series were Red and Blue, and possibly Gold and Silver, and they generally can’t be assed to remember Yellow or Crystal.  Like I said before, I was in this camp once, but that’s only because my only exposure had been to the anime.  I never thought that the newer Pokémon were bad or any such thing, but I associated the drop in quality of the show to a drop in quality in the games, so even when I got myself a portable system I avoided the games.  But, with a mind unclouded by nostalgia, I can safely tell you that the games are all similar enough in game-play and style that I have no clue where these people get off.  Do they want Nintendo to just completely overhaul the series and make something completely different?  No, because Black and White was different and the genwunners hated it because you couldn’t catch any Pokémon from the Kanto region.  I swear, the games just sort of continuously build on the previous ones without removing anything of merit.  Sure, around the fourth generation, some of the monsters started looking a bit goofy; you’re trying to tell me that some robot brontosaurus is the god of Space and Time?  I’d find a kindly British gentleman in a police box more convincing.  There were a few mechanics introduced that weren’t all that good either, like the goddamn honey trees.  I so wanted a Munchlax but the only way to catch one is to smear honey on a certain species of tree, wait eight hours, and hope that the tree you chose is one of the four randomly selected trees in the country capable of attracting a Munchlax! And you might not get a Munchlax even if you picked right!  And the computer selects which Pokémon will be attracted to the tree as soon as you apply the honey, so you can’t just reset until you have a Munchlax!  It would literally take days of trying to get a Munchlax!  Fuck, at this point it would be easier to join Team Rocket and try to steal a Munchlax, and they never succeed at anything![1]

            But do you know what show didn’t degenerate in quality (at least not completely but we’ll get to that)?  Digimon.  As Bryan Chow once put it, “at its best that shit was like the Matrix but with monsters”.  A more perfect line was never said, and I don’t think I have to keep writing after that, but if you insist I’ll go on for at least eighteen pages, 1½ spaced, 12 point, Times New Roman, Justified alignment.  Because it was very important that you know how I like to format.

            So I loved the first four seasons of Digimon (technically they were different series but were billed as the same series in the US; Adventures 01 and 02, Tamers, and Frontier), and I will be talking about those mainly.  There were apparently Digimon games but I haven’t played any of them, so sadly this article will lack a touch of my normal completionism.  Microsoft Word recognizes Pokémon as a word but not completionism.  God damn it Nappa.

            There’s…actually very little hatred among the fandom for anything overtly dumb.  Actually, most of the people who think Digimon is a rip-off of Pokémon are fans of Pokémon.  Most Digimon fans like Pokémon.  I assume that these fine folks are already enlightened as to what will essentially be the contents of this article, and as such they may leave now (just kidding, you guys stay longer).  Well, there is the matter of Adventure 02’s ending, but we can all agree that that was bullshit.

            Now, it took me quite while to come up with this idea, and those of you who are savvy will think I’m an idiot.  Why the Hell didn’t I come up with this as my very first article?  It’s so goddamn obvious you dumb shit!  Two anime series that premiered in America at almost the same time, that starred shonen-y young children and adorable monster companions, and with parents nowhere near as concerned as they ought to be?  Haha, that’s where the similarities end, and you are the one who is a dumbshit.  The two shows are almost nothing alike.

            Because of the sheer amount of content that both franchises have managed to churn out in their fifteen or so years I can’t be arsed to look at each and every little bloody thing.  Pokémon alone has dozens of games, hundreds of episodes, Japan only spinoff mini-series (which look awesome by the way, but again I can’t be arsed), and a bunch of movies. Digimon has hundreds of episodes as well, and some games apparently, which once again I can’t be arsed to play.  Furthermore, since Digimon is several series instead of one continuous one, I can’t do a character head to head, because it’ll amount to Ash and Brock fighting like twelve guys and Ash’s female companions (heretofore referred to as Ash’s Angels) going up against a dozen other girls.  Another thing is that the monsters in Pokémon are basically very clever animals while the ones in Digimon are fleshed out characters who can talk and everything.  So, I’m just going to talk about the first few seasons of the Pokémon anime, the first couple of movies, and the games, as compared to the first four Digimon series.  Fuck, that’s still a lot of shit.

            The Pokémon anime is essentially a slice-of-life piece set in a world where people raise monsters to fight each other for sport.  Ash is just some random kid trying to succeed at his chosen career.  Sure there are dangerous types out there.  Mewtwo is a hyper intelligent bio-engineered super-soldier bent on the extinction of human life!  Team Rocket is an international syndicate of monster-stealing criminals fronting as a legitimate Pokémon organization!  But they take the back-burner to Ash and his life, and the way he deals with his friends and Pokémon as he leisurely travels from town to town, region to region, trying to advance his career.  Sure he foils Team Rocket whenever they rear their ugly, rhyming heads, but he never vows to take out their organization and invades their headquarters and takes out all of their dudes and kills Giovanni in a single-stroke battle then walks out and says “bang” before succumbing to his wounds like Spike Spiegel or anything like that but oh my God what if he did fanfic that shit. 

            Anyway, what sets the Pokémon show apart from other mon-collecting Shonen anime series is the fact that the monsters are just as I’ve mentioned, animals that exist in the world.  They’re not space invaders or from another dimension or bio-weapons from Atlantis.  They’re just more interesting versions of real animals.  And plants.  And rocks.  And…Asian and American stereotypes, I guess.  Now, Pokémon is merchandise driven, but other merchandise driven monster type anime are so much more blatant that it’s sickening.  Yu-Gi-Oh!, Bakugan, all that other shit, is basically a bunch of kids using magical versions of the toys they show’s supposed to be shilling.  Pokémon however, tries to get at the soul of the games, so instead of a couple of kids with obscenely pointy hair whipping out their Gameboys (upgraded to DSs in the later seasons by some fairy perhaps) to summon six foot tall Pikachus from the Shadow Realm, you get Ash and company traveling the land and befriending monsters.

            I can say that there are legitimately touching scenes in Pokémon.  The show made us care about these little freaks of nature that could only say their own names because legitimate personalities shown through.  Pikachu was a trickster archetype.  Charmander became a narcissist as he evolved into Charizard, but with genuine goodness.  Squirtle was a paragon of manliness, the badass leader of the Squirtle Gang whose legacy echoes far and wide across the Kanto region!  I know I was sad when Butterfree left the cast so he could start a family of horrible little grubs.  Whose heart didn’t break when Ash left Charizard behind at the preserve and you realized too late that they really did love each other?  And again when the original gang split up?

            There were some episodes that were just damned creative and awesome.  Like the whole Sabrina story arc.  In the games she’s just another gym leader, but in the show she used her psychic powers to terrorize the whole town and warp people’s perceptions of reality.  She made Misty and Brock think they were trapped in a doll house while a manifestation of her inner evil tried to crush them with a rubber ball.  Then the three of them ran off to get some Ghost type Pokémon, the only things that can beat her, and Ash and Pikachu have an out of body experience.  Then they return with a Haunter, who instead of fighting Sabrina dicks around like a Chick Jones character until she laughs and comes to terms with her inner demons!  Then she just gives them the badge!

            That’s another thing that set the Pokémon anime apart; Ash was not some pointy-haired badass chosen one superhero.  He was just some guy.  More often than not, he would fail at something the first time around, and half the time he got a badge it wasn’t won in a proper battle but given as a gift for services rendered.  In his very first Gym battle, he goddamn surrendered!  Brock gave him the badge anyway for reuniting him with his estranged father!  That’d be like if you bowed out from your first boss fight in a Zelda game, but the Armored Parasite Ghoma gave you a piece of Heart anyway for….reuniting her with her estranged father.  Furthermore, I don’t fallow the show any more, as I have said, but I have it on good authority that Ash has yet to win a single championship.  Those goddamn things that they spend the whole season building up to?  He never wins them.

            Now I’ve spent enough time gushing about the Pokémon anime.  Except for one thing.  Remember that episode where they visit the haunted Japanese-style village on the beach and they learn about a legend concerning some star-crossed lovers, and the girl’s ghost haunts the town to this day?  And Brock falls in love with her ghost and they have to tie him up?  And an unusually powerful Ghastly starts haunting them and speaking in a creepy voice and transforming into monsters and generally being unbeatable until the sun rises?  And at the end it turns out that he was responsible for everything that happened in that town and that he was guarding the girl’s tomb or something, and the gang never quite figures out what happened, and Ash and Misty dance together and she wears a Kimono and looks adorable?  I like that episode.

            And they never made anything like it again, and likely never will.  Around the time Ash got to the Hoenn region, the show got really formulaic.  Oh hai new trainer whose design is inspired by an NPC from the latest game and/or Pokémon who is trending as “popular” in Japan!  You have problems?  Let’s solve them with friendship!  About 500 times.  Apparently the recent episodes set in Unova Region are getting good, but I have yet to see any of them and have no plans to.

            In contrast, the Digimon animes are child-epics in the vein of Narnia, if Narnia were some freakish representation of the internet post-singularity.  Or something.  It’s never made all that clear really.  Now, while the shows are definitely merchandise driven, they eventually became merchandise in themselves, if that makes sense.  At some point they stopped being 22 minute commercials for a Tomagachi knock-off and became the main draw of the franchise.  The third series was written and directed by an award winning director and has been heralded as one of the best anime of all time and “the Evangelion of monster anime” (for those of you not in the know, Neon Genesis Evangelion is an anime series heralded as being not only very good, but artistic and even painful, relying strongly on Christian and Gnostic symbolism to brutally deconstruct the genre and make you beg for the sweet release of death, the Paradise Lost[2] of giant robot cartoons).  Some of those things were said by me.

            But we’ll start with the beginning: Adventure 01!  For those of us way back in 90something when this came out right after Pokémon who didn’t think it was a ripoff, we had our minds blown.  Let me tell you, Digimon just generally looks like they spent a bit more money on it.  It doesn’t look like something from the 90s while the earlier seasons of Pokémon absolutely do.  Now, anyone who’s spent any bloody time at all with both franchises knows that they are nothing alike.  So I’ll talk more about the fundamental, “big-picture” differences than say simply pointing out that DA01 has 8 protagonists instead of three, with one Digimon each instead of full teams.

            Now, Pokémon could definitely have passed for an American cartoon, but not any version of Digimon.  Those of you familiar with the medium will understand that it is divided up into demographics rather than genres, and Digimon fits squarely into Shonen demographic: young teens and boys, and young teens and boys like huge explosions, pointy haired protagonists of their age group pumping their fists at things while wearing goggles for some reason, girls who could be arguably called cute and could potentially become love interests but you don’t make a thing out of it man, this ain’t Shojo demographic get that gay relationships shit out of here, and of course monsters that transform like sixteen times to fight in battles that take like half the season, and it looks like your losing but you see the enemies weakness just in time and BAM take the motherfucker down in like one shot with your most epic godly giga-laser (you need to prefix your lasers to make them sound cool).  Is that a bad thing?  Fuck no.  This is DA01, not Tamers; you get that Oscar winning makes-you-cry-at-the-last-episode philosophy garbage back where it belongs and watch this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEBSSXUqKAg

Cyborg tyrannosaur.  Your argument is invalid.

            Adventure 02 however is where my troubles with this franchise really began, much sooner than the ones with Pokémon as you’ll notice.  It was certainly just as good looking as the previous series (or “season” as they told us in the US, seeing as Fox thought kids couldn’t handle subtitles) and the fact that it continued the adventures of the previous series certainly kept us entertained.  The “game mechanics” so to speak were different this time around, but I suppose that can be forgiven.  I didn’t like the new monsters as much, they seemed to lack the same personality, but it’s okay because the older ones were still around.  The new main protagonist Davis had all the worst qualities of Ty from the previous series and none of the good ones (well “bravery” I suppose is a prerequisite and shouldn’t count), but the other new characters were fine.  Honestly, I stopped watching towards the end of the series when the story got bogged down with this subplot about Black Wargreymon, whose name is entirely too long.  The thing is, it is exactly as if the guy you thought was the final boss of a video game kicked your ass and then suddenly you played as him for most of the third act.  Just goddamned bizarre. 

            In a way, I can say that by skipping on Digimon until Tamers came out, I was spared for a few years at least until I saw the reruns of the last story arc on Disney.  I wanted to throw things by the end.  Why is the bad guy turning good?  Why are we still talking about Black Wargreymon?  Why did they feel the need for the villain of a story arc from the middle of Adventure 01 to come back and secretly be behind everything ever (in the third act of the last episode)?  What’s this bullshit, the human antagonist was just jealous because he wanted a Digimon too? DID THEY GIVE HIM ONE AS HE DIED?  Is this one of those end-montages?  Well I suppose it would be nice to see what happens to them later in life, get some closure on Adventure 1 at least.  Yolei and Ken got together?  That dude’s totally gay for Davis, but Yolei deserves to be happy as one of the few characters who didn’t wangst as much as everyone else.  How about Joe and Mimi?  Not very clear, huh.  But that one seemed obvious!  Ah well, just tell me how many kids Ty had with Sora so we can get on with our liv— You….animals.  What.  The.  Fuck.  She.  Marries.  Mat.  That prick.  No, shut up show, I know you said they went out on a date once, but fuck you.  Ty < 3 Sora have been building up for the whole damned franchise, you miserable, vile abomination.  You just threw in the Mat bullshit to get Ty some pathos, and next thing you know they’re getting married and having children!  You tell us this in a fucking montage as if destroying the alpha couple were no big deal! 

            Okay yes fine this is Shonen show for kids and I was a kid when I watched it so why am I getting mad?  Dear reader, imagine if that beloved anime Romance (in both senses of the word), that perfect blend of Shonen and Shojo demographic appeal Inu Yasha: A Feudal Fairy Tale, ended with a montage in which we are told rather than shown that our heroine Kagome ran off with Miroku the lecherous priest while his love interest Songo had babies with Inu Yasha.  The only foreshadowing we receive all series is those times that Miroku grabbed everyone’s ass.  See how much that would suck?  I know some girls just went into a blind rage over the thought (while others let out a hearty “SQUEEEEEEE < 3” and set to fanfic writing).  Incidentally, keep a look out for Inu Yasha vs. The Lays of Marie de France in which I compare the tropes of anime with medieval European Romance.

            But while Adventures 01 and 02 were certainly more serious fare than Pokémon, they were still mostly about having a good time.  They had their dark moments sure, but it was all still grade-A Shonen stuff.  No real departures from the demographic, much less the genre.  This of course brings us to Digimon Tamers, the Evangelion of kids’ shows!  But first we’re going to talk about the Pokémon movies.

            I’m sure you were all psyched up about reading some more Digimon stuff (sarcasm) especially after how I’ve been gushing over Tamers and all.  But this really is as appropriate a place to talk about it as any other, especially since the Pokémon movies, like Tamers, were a big departure from the original stuff.  Ash Ketchum does not save the world in the show.  He does in the movies though.  Several times.  The franchise goes from slice-of-life-with-monsters to straight up delicious Shonen action with a hint of….pathos?  This is less so in the third movie onward but damn.  Raise your hand sheepishly if the first time a movie made you cry was the climax of Pokémon: The First Movie. 

            Fuckin’ pansy.  But seriously, while many other movies aimed at children over the years have had messages about how differing combinations of friendship love and fun are good, this one is about a genetic abomination with godlike power trying to breed a master race of super-mutants to inherit the earth after he destroys it by flood from his eerie glowing green throne like an old-testament God if he were a kitty.  In the original Japanese dub it’s made even more jarring by having Mew, Mewtwo’s legendary progenitor, being equally disdainful of Mewtwo and his creations!  Not only does the film deal with racism, it deals with two-way racism!  It also featured a scene where it’s explained that Mewtwo was created as a side-project to creating a clone of the scientist’s dead daughter!  And the girl clone died!  And it takes the death and miraculous rebirth of a main character to set things right again at the end!  Now, I’m not saying that this movie should get any Oscars, the message of tolerance itself was delivered somewhat heavy handedly (apparently the Japanese think kids can handle racism and intolerance but not subtlety) but it deserves some acknowledgement for having some goddamned balls!

            Pokémon 2000 upped the stakes again by making Ash the Chosen One who can bring balance to nature.  Now, an ecological message is a few rungs under racism on the scale of “message risk-taking in a kids’ movie”, but everything else about the movie was bigger and the people who made it still clearly gave a damn.  And if straight up calling Ash the Chosen One is a bit corny, remember that the last movie basically made him the Messiah anyway.  Furthermore, Pokémon: The First Movie was essentially just a tournament story-arc like the ones at the end of every season of the show, but with higher stakes.  Ash doesn’t even technically win—again.  Shit, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that Pokémon 2000 is good just because Ash succeeds at something important instead of choking at the end like a punk! 

            But I digress.  While The First Movie was another tournament, 2000 is an epic disaster movie featuring global catastrophes such as hurricanes, whirlpools, and winter storms in the middle of a tropical island chain.  It features a scene where Ash’s tamed monsters pull him across a frozen sea like huskie dogs, a magical ocarina song (a pretty good sound track too now I think about it) a huge fucking airship full of antiques and Renaissance paintings, and one of the rare talking Pokémon.  I don’t know about you guys, but whenever I saw a Pokémon actually talk it was amazing!  The villain too was unique in that he was a legitimately cultured badass who was also a huge nerd.  Usually having a “culture” character in Shonen anime means he’ll drink wine and be dubbed over as British.  The villain here owned a goddamed UFO that looked like the Dodge’s palace inside and he stuffed the damn thing with Pokémon paraphernalia.  Mind you in this world Pokémon are a real part of daily life and there are bound to be like ancient Etruscan artifacts featuring the king of Italy with his Gyarados and suchlike, but c’mon.  C’mon!  All in all, the second movie was bigger and better than the first one, though it did not quite have the same gravitas.

            As for the third movie, Curse of the Unown: it existed.  Haha, I liked it and all, really, but not much about it can be said that can’t also be said about either of the previous two movies.  It’s probably the best looking of the three theatrical films (of course there were more movies, it’s just that America stopped caring enough to release them in theaters).  It also tried to variate on the theme more, like the second movie, incorporating aspects of fantasy and even horror into the film.  Horror?  Yeah, a little girl meddles with things she oughtn’t to have and gains the power to warp reality around her as she begins to think of a wish-granting monster as the ghost of her father and encases her whole town in heavy crystal to look like her ideal fantasy land (which is creepy as hell to everyone sane) while a swarm of psychic three-dimensional letters hums a creepy tune in the grand foyer.  Horror.  But, the threat is scaled back from the previous two films.  While the crystal menace could spread it never does go far beyond the town’s borders and as such the threat is limited to one small town.  It certainly gets props for the creepy “Entei is my daddy” subplot, especially when he starts believing it!  Also, Charizard comes back!  A fact that means nothing to the parents that merely got dragged to see these movies and don’t follow the show at all.  “Why was he gone?  Didn’t he used to pull the sled?”

            Now for that epic: Digimon Tamers!  It was okay.

I’m just joshing it was the best season of Digimon ever made.

            Presumably Chiaki Tonaka, the new creator I mentioned (who by the way writes stories for the Cthulu Mythos) was just as pissed off by the end of Adventure 02 as I was and decided to do away with it.  In some ways Tamers is a response to the previous series, and anime in general, poking fun at them by actually making them a TV show that the new cast watches religiously.  I find that hilarious.  The new protagonist Takato wears goggles for example, but only once he gets himself a Digimon, and only because Ty and Davis wore goggles and he wants to emulate them.  Ironically, he’s nothing like them.  In many ways he’s more like Ash, in that he’s a lovable loser.

            In the previous Digimon series, the kids were kind of unnecessary.  They were important because the plot said they were, but the monsters did all the heavy lifting.  At best, they were the brains of the operation; at worst they were emotional support.  Here though, the kids play a much more active role.  Part of this has to do with the simple fact that the premise is that they live in the “real world” and were fans of Adventure 01 and 02, meaning that they know about Digimon and how they work and what kinds of threats they’re going up against, ironically being more well prepared for the things they haven’t faced than the ones who’ve experienced it.  The biggest thing though, is that they can actively help their Digimon by using their trading cards to give them new weapons and abilities and no this is nothing like Yu-Gi-Oh! because Yu-Gi-Oh! sucks.  Eventually, they even merge with their Digimon and fight as one against the main threat: not a mere villain but an anti-virus program that invaded the real world becoming an eldritch abomination called the D-Reaper that assimilates everything in its path to retard the evolution of intelligent life on all layers of reality.  Badass.

            “But Tony,” you say, “while that does indeed sound badass, it doesn’t seem nearly as earth-shattering as you made it out to be!  Could it be that the blinders of nostalgia have elevated this show beyond its logical place in your memory into something not worthy of the praise you laud upon it?”  First of all, none of my friends are that eloquent so bugger off.  Second of all, what would you say if the comic relief in…any given show really, was some annoying little guy with a big opinion of himself?  The main characters make fun of him and the audience gets a laugh out of his antics for say half the series.  Then, he gets an episode or two to himself, and we see that he takes it personally when we laugh at him.  He just wants to matter god damn it!  So he makes himself a deal with the devil so to speak, power for servitude.  But somehow, our comic relief got the long end of the stick for once in his life and he goes rogue.  Then he goes on a goddamned killing spree.  He’s finally strong enough to destroy everything he hates, and what follows is the death of a major character, followed by what is tantamount to the destruction of his soul—Digimon reincarnate, but another Digimon can absorb their “data” and prevent it from happening.

            This dead character was a warrior of true bravery and knightly virtue and there is no way he is coming back.  And his human partner, yet another comic relief character, is now left bereft alone, robbed of the friend and companion she always dreamed of, and she doesn’t smile again.  And then the D-Reaper gets her.  You may have heard the phrase “shoo out the clowns” in regards to when the comic-relief characters are removed from the action to allow for a serious moment.  This show doesn’t so much shoo the clowns away as much as it traumatizes them until they’re incapable of being funny.

            All of this is to say nothing of the fact that show deals with what would actually happen if extra-dimensional monsters started psychically bonding to children in modern day Japan to fight off yet more monsters along with a cosmic horror for flavor.  Government cover-ups that entail the killing of all Digimon who enter the real world be they good or bad, for example.  Mind you, there’s no way to keep this all out of the public eye once a wild boar the size of a city block destroys half the town. 

            And then there’s the ending.  Usually a show like this would end with the kids and monsters separating from each other with a few good natured quips, after which they emerge as better people and move on with their lives.  Well, this show reminds us that they essentially went through a war together and bonded in ways that few people ever do, having actually become the same being on multiple occasions.  Why would they separate at all?  Because the Digimon have become infected with the same weapon that killed the D-Reaper, which wasn’t destroyed by a well placed gigalaser[3] but by a team of scientists working round the clock to invent a counter-anti-virus while our brave heroes stalled for time and kept the thing from expanding.  The monster friends will die if they don’t leave our world forever.  No one bothered to tell the kids this until the last minute; why tell children anything really, even when they risked their goddamned lives for the sake of every living thing more complex than a few cells?  The kids are understandably pissed, and the last we see of Takato he is a broken young man (at least until the really out of place movie).

            Oh yes, and to quote TV Tropes: “There isn't a single drop of blood on this series, making it suitable for 7-year-old children and above.”  Don’t click that by the way, Tv Tropes Will Ruin Your Life.

            Right, now we’ll walk off that emotional roller coaster ride with some good old fashioned Pokémon video games!  Before we get started, let me share this conversation I had earlier this year (names changed for protection):

Woodrow Baghoul Wilson: Every game that came out this year has a sad or disappointing ending L

ME: Pokémon White 2 ends with you busting an international crime-ring, becoming a multi-billion dollar movie star, and Pokémon league champion.

            Now Digimon has been dominating the majority of this list because it actually has a plot and is longer than 90 minutes.  But the games are where Pokémon shines, and where people forget that Digimon is a thing.  What’s interesting about the games is that the basic structure of each game is about the same: pick a starting Pokémon, go on a journey, collect eight gym badges, go to the League and fight the Fantastic Four I mean the Elite Four, and at some point you foil an international crime ring.  Wait what?  See the plots of each game are vastly different even though each one has all of those elements in that order.  It’s like it’s trying to be a slice of life piece like the anime but all this plot keeps getting in the way.  “Ugh, I’m trying to win a Pokémon beauty contest but this terrorist cell that’s been haunting my every step for the past few miles is holding the television station hostage!  Snore.”

            Even the plots are somewhat generic: every terrorist organization you fight is called team something or other for Christ’s sake!  But it’s not the elements that matter so much as the variation.  Red and Blue, the original games, have you fighting Team Rocket, which is essentially the mafia.  They racketeer Pokémon while masking themselves as a legitimate business, such as a department store or even the last gym battle!  Giovanni, their leader, even looks like a pimp!

            Gold and Silver deal with the fallout of your actions in Red and Blue, as the internal conflict within Team Rocket following your defeat of Giovanni has caused them to splinter and scatter themselves across a new region, with everyone from petty crooks selling bullshit cures to animal abusers to violent thieves and terrorists sporting a Team Rocket logo.  They actually do take over a radio station, in hopes of finding their beloved boss Giovanni (they don’t know how radios work).  But that’s not all, your rival Gary FUCKING Oak, while entertaining, has been replaced with a character named Silver who PLOT TWIST is also looking for Giovanni because PLOT TWIST he’s Giovanni’s son!  And the final boss is PLOT TWIST Red, the protagonist form the previous game!  Aughughallgh!!!!11

            What’s that?  You don’t know who that is?  What happened to Ash?  Oh, Ash is one of the possible preprogrammed names for your character in the original games.  I don’t know why they even had those because you were free to make up your own name from the very beginning.  Canonically, the character in the game is named Red, in Gold and Silver his name is Gold in the original and Ethan in the recent remake.  Unlike in the anime, you get a new character in the beginning of each game instead of it just being the same guy traveling from town to town and abandoning his Pokémon.  Incidentally, Ash is named after Satoshi Tajiri, creator of Pokémon, and Gary is names after Shigeru Miyamoto, who basically is Nintendo.

            Anyway the third generation of games, Ruby and Sapphire, nixed Team Rocket altogether and replaced them with Teams Aqua and Magma, who are essentially warring cults venerating different legendary Pokémon, trying to awaken them and use their power to change the world in their own image.  Aqua wants to flood the earth, and Magma wants to dry up the seas.  Naturally, you cram their respective deities into tiny balls and force them into dogfights for your amusement.  Naturally.

            The fourth generation, Diamond and Pearl (and Platinum) which as I’ve said before is where I stopped caring but it turns out to be really fun, is sort of self-referential and tongue-in-cheek.  It’s like, yeah, this is a Pokémon game, lol.  But not in a bad way.  The individual members of Team Galactic make it clear that they are hapless losers whose only purpose is to be beaten up by you and NPCs openly make fun of the more convoluted game mechanics.  Oh, but it’s also probably the darkest Pokémon generation until the next one.  The leader of Team Galactic, Cyrus, is essentially space-Hitler.  No seriously, the creators of the game said in an interview that they wanted to capture how Hitler managed to turn a crippled nation into a horrific killing machine.  You seriously walk in on a Galactic Rally that’s like Triumph of the Will but with a bunch of losers in bowl cuts instead of Germans.  His goal is to capture Arceus, the Pokémon who is essentially God.  No seriously.

            Our Pokéfather

            Who looks like a mechanical deer

            Hallowed be they name

            Arceus, who created the universe

            Divider of matter and anti-matter

            Who gave the physical world to the two Pokémon of Space and Time

            (Who look goofy as hell, sadly)

            And who gave anti-matter to Giratina

            (Who looks badass and is Ghost/Dragon type)

            And when Giratina did misbehave

            He did banish the Ghost/Dragon for his sins to dwell forever in the Reverse World

            To languish in a realm without the laws of physics

            Yours is the Time

            And the Space

            And the Anti-matter forever and ever, Amen.

So like a punk Cyrus tries to summon robot-deer God and the ritual goes wrong.  How the Reverse World else could it have gone?  He doesn’t summon God, he summons the Pokémon equivalent of the Devil, and the game proceeds to show us that we are but worms when Cyrus, the man who has been a scourge and a terror upon the fair land of Sinnoh, is devoured on the instant by the Father of Lie types.

Needless to say, you can cram both God and the Devil into tiny balls and make them fight for your profit and amusement.

            Now the final and (in my opinion) best generation is the fifth one, comprising of Black and White versions and their direct sequels.  White 2 by the way is the only time I’ve used the female protagonist because the male protagonist looks like the king of Douche Island (I now love Microsoft Word because it insisted that Douche Island be capitalized).  Why is this generation the best?  Because you get to fight PeTA.

            Team Plasma is a parody of PeTA, let’s just throw that out there.  They make you question how exactly all this (gestures at Pokémon world) works.  You say you’re befriending the creatures and helping them achieve their true potential, but they don’t really have a choice in the matter do they?  Do you like Mudkips?  Does your Mudkip like you, or is that just the Stockholm Syndrome talking?  Where do you get off man?

            Of course, they come across as self-righteous assholes because if you don’t fall for their shtick they sic their own Pokémon on you and try to steal your for their own good of course.  But it soon becomes apparent that their whole plan is to become the dominant philosophy in the region, and then as the old adage goes “if you criminalize guns, only criminals will have guns” though “guns” is replaced with “electric rodents and fire-breathing dragons and horrible rock-men, oh my”.  But not all of them are like that!  N, one of their leaders and essentially their messiah, truly believes that Pokémon would be better off without humans interfering in their lives.  You still fight him of course, but he has a different team every time because he befriends local Pokémon and asks them to fight with him once.  By the time the sequels roll around, N has split off from the original Plasma and once again there’s a Team Civil War on our hands, but this time its animal rights activists vs. animal abusers!  It’s brilliant.

            And of course there’s the whole thematic struggle of the generation: Truth versus Ideals.  Is it foolish to try to impose our will on reality or is it a misery to accept the world as it is?  Now of course this is a kids’ game so there’s never any real Pokémon vs. People violence and they try to portray the world as a happy little paradise where everyone becomes BFFs with their chosen monsters, but there are always horror stories at the very fringe of the games if you look closely enough.  Species of Pokémon that stalk people out in the in the desert, a trainer that was left in a vegetative state for abusing his telepathic monster, Team Rocket cutting off the tails of wild Pokémon to sell as a bullshit herbal medicine, Pokémon Devil eating Space Hitler alive (oh wait that happens right in front of you, never mind).  The world of Pokémon as presented to the player is in itself an ideal of what it ought to be.  Is it wrong to hide the uglier truths of the world, or should you hold onto your ideals in the hopes that one day they will become truth?

            Oh shit, that got all heavy and philosophical, here’s a penis joke.  That was it.

            Now the fifth generation is somewhat controversial because it tried to sort of start over, with all new Pokémon, and none of the previous ones available until the aftergame, and a few other changes that only people who play competitively will notice but who cares those guys are losers.  EV training?  No thank you, I enjoy video games.  So that’s as good a segue as any into our final topic, Digimon: Frontier!

            Frontier is considered the black sheep of the Digimon franchise because it actually tried to take the series in a new direction.  I mean, I love Tamers but that show still followed the same formula of “kids and monsters travel between their world and ours to fight off evil monsters except there’s LOTS OF FEELS IN THIS ONE”; Tamers was brilliant because of the difference in the details, it was a favorite dish prepared with exotic new ingredients.  In contrast, Frontier was a completely different meal that featured the same main ingredient; one could say the difference between a hamburger and a steak sandwich.  Hmm, now I’m hungry….

            One hamburger and several cheap cuts of beef later, I’m here to tell you that Frontier gets a lot of undeserved flack for being different.  Honestly it’s a different kind of story from the ones Digimon is used to.  Not as tonally dark as Tamers but not as light-hearted as Adventure 01 and 02, and for the first and only time in the franchise, our heroes do not receive monster companions.  As the chosen ones, they can become Digimon!  This is just the logical conclusion of the increased interactivity started in Tamers.  Since most Digimon are sentient beings, it doesn’t really make any sort of sense for them to need human companions, unlike Pokémon who as I‘ve said are simply very clever animals.  By making the humans and their partners one and the same they get to be relevant.

            Another thing that’s different is how “the call to adventure” as TV tropes would call it, is made.  In Adventures 01 and 02, our heroes just stumble into the magical Digital World.  In Tamers, the kids bring the Digital World here when Takato accidentally creates his companion Guilmon, and they only journey there for a single story arc.  In Frontier, a literal call is sent out to hundreds of kids’ cell phones asking them to go on a journey.  Someone in the Digital World knows that humans will be significant but not who or why, so they try to recruit as many as possible.  The kids pile into a train station that wasn’t there the other day, filled with trains that lack conductors and have faces like monsters and animals.  Then they set off into the unknown, to a Digital World that has literally been dissolving for ages now, with huge gaps in reality passable only by the Trailmons’ rails, which inexplicably crisscross even the emptiness in space.

            The story of Frontier seems more like a classic children’s adventure fantasy than a monster anime.  I have made vague allusions to Narnia throughout this essay, and I can say that Frontier is the one series that comes close to capturing the same feel.  Just a sort of otherworldliness that doesn’t come through as much in the other series.  The Adventures’ Digital World for example didn’t seem to have much of a history behind it.  There were allusions to event that happened long ago but these are almost all things that impact the plot directly.  The main eight Digimon for example were all raised together so they could be together when their kids came.  In Tamers, the Digital World is a bit more fleshed out; it is ruled over by several Digital Sovereigns who venerate the Catalyst, a program that makes evolution possible (I refuse to say “digivolve”, wait dammit), with the admin programs called “digi-gnomes” acting like angels or fairies and the D-Reaper being like a devil figure, but this is all somewhat undercut by the fact that Tamers plays up the fact that these are all mere representations of data from the real world and all their vast history only dates back to the early 90s.

            The World of Frontier however, feels like a real world that has existed longer than say, Mario.  We learn that the central conflict of the first story arc was caused by a love triangle between the three angelic rulers of antiquity.  When Ophanimon chose Seraphimon, Cherubimon thought that it was because they were both humanoid creatures and he was a beast-like Digimon, which led to a massive war between Beast and Human Digimon, resulting in the death of Seraphimon, the imprisonment of Ophanimon, and the subjugation of the world by Cherubimon and his beasts.  Devine warriors from both classes who sought to end the conflict were martyred,  but their spirits are still out there somewhere, and whoever finds them will be able to gain their power, perhaps enough to kill an Angel.  Nowhere in that summary were the key words present in the back stories of the other series; evolution, human children, evil, the word digital.  Anyone could claim a spirit by the by.  There’s a whole story arc about an opposing team of Digimon who possess all the Beast Spirits. 

            If this show had not been about Digimon, the plot could serve very well as a regular fantasy series.  Children from all over the world get a call to go on a journey and take a train ride to a magical land with a back story of love, betrayal and racism, in order to claim the spirits of fallen heroes in hopes of becoming them?  Fuck.  Yes.  Oh and the finally got rid of the damned “digi” appended to every instance of evolution, calling the process of becoming a Digimon “Spirit Evolution”.  I’m not one of those guys who get pissed off whenever they change a term slightly in the American dub of an anime, but the “digi” attached to bloody everything in the previous series made me very aware that I was watching a cartoon.  We get it you’re not Pokémon, move on.  Finally, as one last reason that Frontier was awesome, they finally changed the dopey theme song into a vastly superior one that at least gives you some inkling as to what the show is actually about.  Behold: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eOJsm9ubGk

            So in conclusion, I am a manchild who watches children’s television programs and attaches deep meanings to them so he won’t feel dumb while also playing children’s video games and bonding with imaginary spark-mice and transsexual frog-rabbits BUT GOD HELP YOU IF YOU JUDGE MY BABY.  Also, remember Monster Rancher?  I liked that show.

Oh hey, Tamers wasn’t all that dark; everything I said was true but it’s still a kids show and full of goofy kid things and adorably cute moments.  Behold:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIgv6PU-MWk

OH GOD NO THE FEELS MANAGED TO SNEAK IN THERE IN THE MIDDLE

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[1] Munchlax

[2] For those of you not in the know, Paradise Lost is an epic poem by John Milton heralded as being very good artistic, epic in scope and grandeur, the Lord of the Rings of epic poetry.

[3] This made up word makes this comparative essay officially longer than any other one I have written for this blog.  Yay?