When it was first announced that the new Digimon Tri series was changing from a television series to 6 movies, I expected the reasoning was to provide higher quality animation. However, it has become apparent that what Toei is truly aiming for; is to maximise movie ticket sales due to Digimon Adventure fans being starved for content.
The majority of the 'movie' is dialogue placed onto still frames, the basics of visual stroytelling is "show, don't tell" . The best scene to highlight the failure of that is when it cut to it raining in the digital world and one of the digimon said it was just sunny a minute ago, they could at least show the transition of the two weather effects. All of these saved costs and I was expecting the climax of the movie to be an all out fight scene, instead we get a slideshow of mega level digimon bumping into each other with no special moves being utilised. Transcendent Sword, terra force, giga blaster, the list goes on. I'm not expecting Your Name or Unlimited Blade Works level of quality but this was embarrassing.
The writing is incredibly poor as well, one moment has the DigiDestined taking refuge at school where they proceed to tell scary stories at night. Although enjoyable for some members of the audience, the scene is misplaced and takes time away from a movie where already very little is happening. The only explanation for this is that they can create likeable characters to allow for more selling of merchandise.
The 02 cast is completely ignored for no explicit reason, I mean I don't care about Iori or Miyako but the CHARACTERS should. There is no reason for them not to be constantly worried/searching for them, it feels unnatural and shows the writers either aren't willing to put in any real effort or don't care about the original source material.
Meiko is a pretty divisive character and I am of the side where she detracts from the series. Especially in this movie, she steals screentime and adds nothing to the cast dynamic. It's like they wanted to make a character so shy introverts can relate to her and feel they belong in the digimon cast. She takes up more than half the movie and its showing that she's going to the main hero of the series which is beyond annoying. It was advertised as digimon adventure cast kicking ass, not digimon adventure cast babysitting a wannabe Shinji with none of her character quirks explained.
It's not like it was all terrible, it often has good ideas with terrible execution. If I was in charge and could go back in time, I would create a Digimon prequel movie with the original 5 DigiDestined (Maki and Daigo) and in the end credits of that announce digimon tri. Also would scrap Meiko's character entirely. The story of tri would focus on Maki manipulating Taichi and others to revive Tapirmon while being manipulated herself. That is happening right now but it's kinda displayed in the movies as an afterthought rather than the focus.
I wouldn't be so upset if this was a regular 2 cour series, but this is 6 movies with 6-9 months wait time in between each one and the animation and story is incredibly subpar. I am glad that a digimon adventure sequel even exists but extremely disappointed at how lackluster it is. Toei is exploiting digimon fans and their trust in the franchise to make a few extra dollars.
