Digimon Adventure (1999) & Digimon Adventure: Our War Game! (2000)

Bandai was pretty quick to expand on their line of Digimon virtual pet toys after they debuted in 1997 (as I wrote in my post about Digimon as a franchise from a while back), commissioning both an anime television series and a theatrical short at the same time, and eventually deciding to have the latter act as a prequel to the former—the short premiered as part of one of Toei Animation’s film festivals the day before the series began. That a company like Bandai would want to get in on the multimedia action ASAP is not a surprise (they’re also heavily involved in both Ultraman and Kamen Rider as well), and I can imagine that the meteoric rise of Pokémon at around the same time encouraged them to hype up their own battling monster concept as much as possible. But there’s a lot more going on in the early days of Digimon’s animation history, which makes it more interesting than just another toy franchise getting some spin-offs.

First and foremost, there’s the involvement of animator Mamoru Hosoda. Hosoda had really wanted to work for Studio Ghibli, and while his application was rejected, he was encouraged by Hiyao Miyazaki himself to continue pursuing his art. He then found work at Miyazaki’s old stomping grounds at Toei, and eventually was given the role of directing the Digimon Adventure short, impressing Toei enough that a year later he also directed the next Digimon film, Our War Game!, which in turn impressed the heads of Ghibli enough that they finally decided to hire him (meanwhile, those two short films were haphazardly cobbled together with two later Digimon films, and a soundtrack of contemporary pop songs, to create the English-language Digimon: The Movie, released theatrically in October 2000. This blog post is about the original Japanese versions, as the English compilation would probably be better suited for an Ink & Pain post.) Hosoda was intended to direct Howl’s Moving Castle, but creative clashes with the studio convinced him to leave, which led to Miyazaki taking over the project (an experience that seems to have left Hosoda with some long standing bitterness that has shown up in his subsequent films and in interviews.) In the two decades since, Hosoda has directed a string of acclaimed and award-winning animated films including The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Wolf Children, and Mirai, all praised for their distinctive animation and emotional content (his 2009 film Summer Wars, in terms of theme and story, is essentially a re-imagining of Our War Game!) And to think, it all started with Digimon.