Digimon Adventure 2020 Episode 1 Review: Clean Animation and a Faster Pace

Digimon Adventure 2020 debuted in the old Dragon Ball Super timeslot on Fuji TV, and I liked its first episode. It has clean animation, vibrant colors, strong music in its action scenes and a faster pace than the original series. So far, so good.

I saw the premiere subtitled. I'm coming at it as someone who respects Digimon but doesn't know much about it beyond surface level, so this is a first impression rather than a deep analysis.

My history with Digimon before Digimon Adventure 2020

I saw Digimon when I was very young, when the dub was on television. I never saw the Japanese version, with one exception. A long time ago I got my hands on the Japanese versions of the movies. I think it was the first three, if I remember correctly, though they may have been OVAs. I did like Digimon. There were some things I didn't like about it, but it was a fun show.

Because I never saw it in Japanese, I'm not familiar with the voices or much of the music. I haven't seen it since I was a kid, and my memories are vague. I only saw season one and the first few episodes of season two, which I think was the Armor Digivolve season, so I'm mostly familiar with season one. I never went back to it. That isn't because I don't like it. I never had the time, and it's something I saw growing up.

To keep it real, this isn't my expertise. Dragon Ball is my expertise, and I can tell you everything about that series backwards and forwards. With Digimon, it's been so many years that I don't even know whether there was censorship, although I did hear from somebody that there were differences between the dub and the sub.

Old characters, new story: what Digimon Adventure 2020 is

From my understanding, the new show takes the old characters from season one and puts them in a brand new story. It isn't quite a reboot. Apparently some things will be the same, but the story goes in a different direction.

For somebody like me who remembered the original only vaguely, this was all new. If there were nostalgic references, I wasn't going to pick them up as much as someone who had seen the show more recently than me or who was a Digimon expert. The first episode introduces the main character, Taichi, and the group that will end up being the players of Digimon Adventure 2020.

Dragon Ball Super animators and the Fuji TV timeslot

On the production side, I think many of the animators who worked on Dragon Ball Super are going to be on this show. These are Toei staffers who also work on One Piece, which is one of Toei's biggest properties or maybe the biggest right now, as well as Pretty Cure and others. We already saw many of them appear in episode one, with more coming in future episodes.

Unlike Dragon Ball Super, which was plagued with production problems from the beginning, Digimon Adventure 2020 had a lot of planning ahead of time. Dragon Ball Super didn't get its act together until the Tournament of Power, which is why that arc looks so much better than the rest of the series.

I had heard about the series back in October. I didn't break the story, because I'm not a Digimon outlet, but I did discuss knowing about it before it was announced in a Dragon Ball Super update I put out a couple of months earlier, because I knew this show was taking over the timeslot. I wasn't sure of it at the time. I was told, and I didn't get to double source it.

When this aired, I presumed the show would be on for probably a year, possibly less. As for Dragon Ball Super coming back to this timeslot, that may or may not happen. It was very hard to say, especially with coronavirus, but in the meantime Digimon was there to take its place.

Clean animation and a Tokyo that looks like the real thing

The point I most want to make is that this first episode looks great. The animation is clean, everything is crisp, and it is beautiful. I enjoyed the visual aesthetic of Digimon Adventure 2020.

One thing that tripped me out was a scene early in the episode where a train is out of control and the characters run to get to the train station. Having been to Japan at the beginning of the year, it made sense to me now. I saw them run through the subway, the Shibuya line and the different train lines. They're not identical to real life, but they look the way they do in real life, or close to it.

That brought a smile to my face because I now have a better frame of reference for what they're showing. It makes me wonder whether going back to older anime set in Japan, now that I've been there, would change my perspective on certain things.

Agumon, the digital world and a bigger internet

The first half of the episode involves digital anomalies and strange things going on in the world, and it turns out they have to do with the Digimon. Agumon is introduced halfway through, so we're already seeing familiar characters from the original series. I'm very curious to see how much they diverge from the original, and it seems like it could be a lot, because the pacing of this episode felt much faster than the old series, which I would say was fast paced at some moments too.

There's an action sequence with Agumon that has incredible music. It felt good and it looked good, and so far I'm very impressed. The colors are vibrant, it's an easy show to sit through and very pleasing to the eyes, and the action looks strong even though this is only the first episode.

Taichi ends up inside the network, which I think was called the digital world in the original dub. I'm not sure about the Japanese. He gets stuck in there, and that's where he meets Agumon. Koshiro becomes the exposition character, explaining to Taichi what's going on with the digital world, the network and the Digivice. When Taichi goes into the digital world, his tablet transforms and reality changes around him.

The episode opens by talking about how the internet keeps getting bigger. What blows my mind is that when the original series came out around 1999 and 2000, the internet was still developing. It wasn't what it is now. Today there are so many hard drives and so much data on the web compared with the 90s that I feel this is a better representation of a digital world. Digimon makes more sense now, and in some ways the original series was ahead of its time.

Computer viruses, Space Invaders and an out of control train

There's a cool sequence where Agumon takes down enemies while, on a laptop, you see what look like Digimon versions of Space Invaders disappearing. That was a cool touch, and I enjoyed it.

The Digimon they're facing in the digital world is like a computer virus that keeps evolving. As it evolves, the uncontrollable train on the Tokyo loop gets faster and faster, risking the lives of everyone aboard. If it derails, everybody dies. It's interesting how the Digimon act like computer viruses here. That reminds me of the old series, and I remember an aspect of that being there, but it's been so long.

Greymon's transformation and the Tournament of Power filter

Agumon evolves into Greymon. I'm very surprised that we're already seeing several evolutions in the first episode. I like Greymon's design, and I always have. The transformation sequence is freaky, with everything mutating with all these colors. It's very interesting looking.

I'm not an expert on this, but I feel like the show has the same picture filter Dragon Ball Super had during the Tournament of Power. I could be wrong, but it seems like that could be the case, because that scene in particular reminds me of it.

Greymon uses Mega Flame, the enemy is history, and the train crash is avoided. That wraps up the episode's main plot thread.

The US military network cliffhanger and my verdict

They did a good job introducing the characters, though not all of them, because there are many more to come. The original had tons of characters. It's a good introduction to the world even if you've never seen the original show, though things are a bit different this time.

The virus continues. The cliffhanger is that the US military's tactical data network has been targeted, which puts the entire world at risk because that's a lot of power that could end up corrupted. This episode takes place in Japan, not the US, but with the power of the internet, I presume we can get there quickly. That's where the story picks up in episode two.

I liked episode one of Digimon Adventure 2020. I know there are some big animators coming in the future, and I might keep going with it. I'm not a Digimon expert, so I can't give it the level of analysis I give Dragon Ball Super or Dragon Ball Z without going back over the original. But so far, so good. I'm enjoying it, and the episode flew by.