Digimon Tamers ★★★☆☆
It’s interesting watching this after Serial Experiments Lain and seeing Chiaki J. Konaka reusing ideas in a more child-friendly show and with the government conspiracy angle on control of the internet/digital world. I am doing another nostalgia trip here so I rewatched the English dub and while it can be kind of frustrating how the dub cannot let any moment breath without shoehorning in extra jokes and one-liners I was surprised at how often I did actually laugh at those and at least it’s not trying to pretend they’re not in Japan—the onigiri are called rice balls, not doughnuts. I was also surprised, considering all the other censorship, how horny the dub is about Renamon. I guess she just tends to have that effect on people.
Pacing overall can be a bit weird. My memory of the show was that it picks up at the halfway mark when they go to the digital world, but it’s quite the opposite; it becomes quite meandering for a while until they finally get to Beelzemon attacking the cast and kicking off the Jeri suffering arc. The actual fight against the D-Reaper was also very drawn out in ways that were unfortunately not very interesting and not helped by a lot of fairly stiff and limited animation, but it still does the big emotional moments well.
Rika is a great character with an unfortunate arc. I appreciate that they made the character who starts off thinking that digimon are just data and only for fighting the girl of the main trio and it makes sense as an arc for that kind of character to soften up and start to hate fighting, but the combination of those two things and how it’s written ends up with having the main female character becoming more passive and her role in the final battle being giving her power to be support for a guy who showed up halfway through the show, made even worse how this is illustrated by Sakuyamon stripping off her armour.
I also quite enjoy how they use distributed computing à la Folding@home to help the kids get back home as a counterpoint to the bad guy is defeated in Digimon: The Movie via being