The key to Digimon Adventure Tri, is spotting when the dream dies. Currently the highest rated review of Tri is a glowing positive review for the film series, but closer examination reveals it was posted in November of 2015, immediately after the very first movie. It is fairly representative of how fans reacted to the series on launch, a positive outpouring of support and affection. How is it
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The key to Digimon Adventure Tri, is spotting when the dream dies. Currently the highest rated review of Tri is a glowing positive review for the film series, but closer examination reveals it was posted in November of 2015, immediately after the very first movie. It is fairly representative of how fans reacted to the series on launch, a positive outpouring of support and affection. How is it considered now? Well now it's more complicated.
As the name suggests Digimon Adventure Tri. is meant to be a second sequel to the classic kids with monsters anime Digimon Adventure, and no discussion of Tri and its failings can be performed without a look back at its roots. The original Digimon Adventure is a classic for a reason, as cheap looking as it often was the series was a real gem of a series built on an exceedingly strong cast, a fabulous world, and legitimately powerful writing. Digimon Adventure was an important series for my childhood, it was smarter, sharper, more exciting, and a smidgen more mature than just about any other kid's show I'd ever seen. Digimon Adventure was followed up with Digimon Adventure 02, a broadly maligned sequel anime that was more than a bit of a mess. Over the years 02 grew an incredibly negative reputation, and so when Tri began making the media rounds the emphasis was solely on the return of the original cast. Set 3 years 02, Tri pitched itself as a glorious return to form with the original cast. The gang is all back, Taichi, Yamato, Sora, Koushirou, Mimi, Jyou, Takeru, and Hikari are all on hand in a brand new adventure. Tri wanted to be a grown-up adventure for its cast of grown up fans, one that cut the ballast of 02 and entered a new age of Digimon. Instead it shook out to be another 02, a hot, jumbled mess of dropped plot threads, stupid characters, bizarre motivations, and muddled theme.
The actual plotline of Tri involves the original Chosen Children reuniting with their Digimon partners and being called back into action in the face of strange dimensional distortions caused by a virus that is ravaging the digital world and driving digimon into fits of destructive violence. Moreover time has eroded something in the character of our heroes, Taichi is struck for the first time with his responsiblity, Yamato looks to the past, Jyou is trying to figure out his priorities, Mimi is facing the weight of culture, and at the center of the mess is Mochizuki Meiko and her partner, Meikuumon, who are more than they appear.
Then Movie 4 happens and it all falls apart. I mention the character arcs of only half the cast and that's because Tri totally drops the ball on doing character work after movie 3. I'll be honest, I was never big into Tri. Tri bugged me from minute one because it frankly wasn't the Digimon Adventure sequel I wanted it to be, but I also realized from minute one that that was entirely a personal problem. Tri didn't explore anyone or anything I particularly wanted to see more of, and I make no secret of that, but up until movie 4 I would and will give honest praise to Tri's knack for characters and plotting. I understand and even approve of what they did with all the characters. I thought Taichi's hesitation was actually a clever and interesting progression of the character. I thought the contrast he made with Yamato did something really interesting, a clever twist on their rivalry that's at once the same and different. I loved what they did with Mimi and Jyou, Takeru makes a mistake that's totally him, Koushirou is presented in a way that's always been there in the series but comes about in a brand new light. And then movie 4 happened and we got 90 minutes of Sora acting out of character and being dumb as hell. And then movie 5 happened and the really important character developments from movie 4 suddenly didn't exist anymore. And then movie 6 happened and it was a dreary, boring slog where the character developments from movie 4 suddenly happened when they were convenient but not really. There is a clear point late in movie 3 where it all falls apart, and it's kind of breathtaking how bad the back half of Tri becomes.
A theory I've seen bandied about with regards to Tri is that halfway through they got the go-ahead for a sequel and had to scrap the pacing and closure on the series. This explains an awful lot. It explains why movie 4 was a holding pattern, why a major plotline suddenly ends for no reason, why the back half of Tri suddenly inverts itself to dump in Digimon's most overused villain, it explains why certain characters have nonsensical motivations and do erratic random things, it explains why one antagonist is put on a bus and given no closure to their arc and why another antagonist merrily skips away at the end of the film series to sequel bait, it possibly explains the really really weird trajectory of the 02 cast and why everyone is apparently holding an idiot ball regarding them. What I'm trying to get across is that Tri is structurally unsound. The back half and the front half do not come into alignment. A great many plot threads which seemed to be going in one direction suddenly abruptly end or invert themselves or trail off. A lot of foreshadowing goes nowhere, and a lot of plot beats introduced later on make almost no sense in the whole context of the series.
Additional scorn must be given to Mochizuki Meiko AKA the death of hope. Meiko set off my cynicism alarm from minute one. I had no doubt that Meiko existed to resolve the tiresome Taichi/Yamato/Sora love triangle, but I'll give credit to the writers: I started to dislike her for completely unrelated reasons. Meiko is a horrible character, though I have some sympathy for her. It's not her fault she's the wrong sort of character used in the wrong sort of way in the wrong setting with the wrong story and given the wrong character arc. Meiko is mildly interesting early on because she's set up as a direct contrast to the main cast and she has some really great scenes with Mimi, but it turns out with the benefit of hindsight those scenes were great entirely because of Mimi (who is probably the only person to come out of Tri looking good). Meiko is meant to be much more ordinary and normal and in over her head than the rest of the cast, but unlike someone like Takato from Digimon Tamers in practice what this means is that she fails at everything and always makes the wrong choice. Meiko is boring, every time she tries she fails and the longer it goes on the less patience I had with her. Meiko manages to succeed exactly one time in the entire series, not without help and not without people pushing her to actually make the right choice, and then it's only to finally resolve the one piece of foreshadowing Tri actually kept all the way through.
Meiko's failure ties into Tri's other major failure: Tri is totally pants at keeping a consistent theme. As Tri progresses the series starts trying to put together a unifying theme, but it's very much in vain. Tri posits a theme about overcoming loss and how you can't go home again, but the series is remarkably maladroit at actually pulling through. One character is described as being driven mad by loss and this is meant to be in contrast to someone else, but we see so little of this person's real character that the parallel implied is a joke. A major thing happens in movie 4 with the message that everything will become different, but it isn't. "You can't go home again" says Tri, but it turns out that the place you go when you leave home is remarkably similar to your metaphorical home, and oh actually you can go home again. Wow, that was easy. At the very very end of Tri the characters start making noise to the effect that the theme is moving forward and creating a bright future, but that's only at the very last minute and if that's really the point they wanted to make it looks bad alongside Tri's downright bleak ending.
So how's the production work? Pretty good actually. The animation is generally solid, not 100% of the time but solid enough that you can tell it had a good budget (though perhaps not good enough?). I think most of the character designs are a little bit too same-y, but I've no deep issues with them and you can still definitely recognize who they're supposed to be and tell them apart. The digimon look a little off to me and I'm not a fan of the evolution sequences but that's all purely stylistic and it's not like they look bad persay. The OST is good, Butterfly remains a wonderful song, Brave Heart is still my least favorite evolution theme of all time but it's here as well as it probably should be. Cinematography is generally excellent and most of the battles are acceptable. The action isn't Xros Wars or V-Tamers or Appmon levels of good but it's not really bad either. The cast equip themselves well to the work, and all the new cast are real good ringers for the original characters. Tri is a pretty enough movie series visually, it's just too bad about the rest.
The punchline to Tri is how bad it looks in comparison to the other Digimon media that came out during its lifespan. Tri wanted to tell a mature grown-up story about Digimon and dealing with regret and about the pains and virtues of growing up and moving forward, but it flubbed it. Fortunately there's Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth/Hacker's Memories which ACTUALLY told a story about all those things. Cyber Sleuth/Hacker's Memories effortlessly hits a lot of the mature storytelling beats Tri struggled to land. Similarly Tri wanted to be a forward looking Digimon series that would represent the franchise's strengths and lead the way into the future, but the show that actually did that was the excellent Digimon Universe Appli Monsters. Appmon is a fantastic show with the same mix of strong characters, powerful writing, and wonderful setting that turned Digimon Adventure into a hit almost 20 years ago. The ending of Tri and Appmon are almost mirror images of each other, except that Appmon earned its final moments whereas Tri just kept on flubbing it. Hell, Tri looks bad compared to all the good previous seasons of Digimon. Tri isn't as consistently good as Digimon Adventure, it hasn't got the maturity of Digimon Tamers, and it hasn't got the energy and passion of Digimon Savers. Tri is a drag, and mores the pity for it.
Tri is bad. It's not bad from the beginning, but it's quite bad by the end. Tri is also an excellent case study for why it's important to reserve judgment. I saw so many people completely on board with Tri giving rave reviews of the first movie in a six movie franchise, and unfortunately those people gave a definitive evaluation far too early. It was fascinating to watch how Tri moved the fanbase, rave reviews gave away to profound disgust and disappointment and finally, and most damning, into silence. Still, Tri made a boatload of money for Toei and so we're getting a sequel. Heck, maybe it'll even be good.
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