Digimon Adventure: Last Evolution Kizuna

After being majorly let down by Digimon Tri, the Adventure series seems to have been given one last chance (maybe? And a new remake/spinoff in April?) to go out with a bang. Though it seems like the Adventure series has and will be milked like a Dairymon (there is surprisingly no cow Digimon to make this joke work) for the time being, this film does actually live up to its title and thankfully concludes with a level finality while also calling back to many of the things that made us fall in love with the franchise all those years ago.The film strikes a nice balance between telling a new story to wrap things up while also referencing many classic moments in the series and fanservice without going overboard. The opening scene is a great example of this while also showcasing the best animation of the film. This opening scene was very exciting but unfortunately raises expectations on the visual front a bit higher than the rest of the film is able to manage. After the scene concludes, we're quickly shown some generic cgi crowd and pedestrian shots and reminded to keep our expectations in check. Overall the films visuals are an upgrade from Tri, though in all honesty that isn't really saying much. The character art and animation is solid and the designs are definitely an upgrade from what has recently been put out. Unfortunately the main villian Digimon is animated fully in CG and some of the later action, showcased after an extended period of plot and talking suffers from heavy CG use not present earlier in the film. On the character front, it's great seeing all our favourites grown up and (mostly) achieving their future aspirations. This is also a major theme of the film, and coupled with a plot that directly draws on and even uses the classic child character designs, really brings the story full circle and amps up the nostalgia factor. Additionally, seeing these characters we grew up with drinking alcohol and having their porn stashes found by their digimon (yep) really drives home how many years have passed since seeing these characters for the first time. This nostalgia is likely what most fans are looking for in a film like this, and on this level I feel the film succeeds, and to a much greater degree than Tri. The plot at times felt reminiscent of the first Digimon film to me, with some of the staging of scenes being direct callbacks to the film. The themes of the film focus on loss and acceptance and the power to move on mirrored in both the films antagonist and Taichi and Matt. The film manages to be quite serious at times, with some fairly serious real world stakes both small and grand scale. It's able to evoke a few really emotional moments and like I hinted at the beginning of the review as well, the film does actually has the guts to live up to its title and for that I commend it. Overall Digimon:Last Evolution is a nice send-off to the series that should certainly satisfy fans in a way Tri didn't even come close or TRY to (sorry). At this point, I feel like that's the best Digimon fans could have asked for.

Kizuna is a deeply personal insult to people who grew up enjoying Digimon and still feel enough lingering affection for it that they would watch Kizuna after the atrocity that Tri was. It is not merely worse than Tri was: it is one of the worst, most mean-spirited, most VILE movies I've ever seen, period. While Tri was ultimately about how "growing up" means casting aside childish things—a conclusion it seems to abruptly pivots away from because that long series was unpopular—Kizuna is about how enjoying childish things as an adult makes you a psychopath. This review could only contain spoilers for the entire thing. I'vebeen fuming for the last 30 minutes trying to figure out where to start this, pacing back and forth through my apartment, fuming and suppressing the urge to scream out of consideration for my neighbors. Because, unlike with Tri, I am definitely in the minority when it comes to hating Kizuna. So I think starting on a positive note would be best, like Kizuna does. The battle that opens the movie has good choreography and it animated quite well. It's almost a direct apology for some of the sins of Tri, which was barely animated most of the time and had horrid fights. However, that opening fight is also meaningless. The fact that the DigiDestined occasionally fight Digimon in the real world is never relevant or even mentioned again. Indeed, this is so disconnected from the rest of the story that it pretty much underscores the fact that you DO NOT have to watch Tri to understand Kizuna. It is only referenced when Mei and Meicomon appear on screen for a few seconds. All of the MILLIONS of threads left loose by Tri are completely ignored and one is even blatantly, nonsensically contradicticed by Kizuna later. Which, as a fan, bothers me because why did I sit through that entire series if it was going to be made completely irrelevant by the very next entry. But, equally, as a fan, set me up to enjoy Kizuna more because it immediately signaled that it wasn't going to get bogged down with opening Tri's mystery boxes based on Deep Lore nobody gives a damn about. However, this good vibe was not to last. The second that that opening fight is over, the movie immediately starts ranting about how Tai and Matt are growing up and growing apart from the group. This was what I was worried about when the trailer proudly announced that this story would threaten to make the DigiDestined lose their Digimon for no other reason than that they "grew up." When did Digimon become about outgrowing friendships and casting people you love aside for the sake of your own growth? What was the purpose of reuniting the DigiDestined with their Digimon at the beginning of Tri if Tri would then spend the entire rest of the runtime being about how the Digimon didn't fit into their lives—even exiling the Digimon to the Digital World and giving them amnesia before undoing that? What was the point of Kizuna coming along immediately afterwards to say, definitively, that they must permanently get rid of their Digimon because of non-negotiable natural laws that always existed and nobody ever mentioned "because it's sad?" The point is that the people behind this story hate telling Digimon stories, and they're using their artificial monopoly on telling Digimon stories to tell their fans "Fuck you for liking this. Grow up," where their version of "grow up" is joining the joyless monotony of everyday life. But it takes it even further than that, to outright condemn people for wanting the series to continue to reflect the themes like long-lasting friendship and the power of people's bonds with each other. Again, Kizuna wants you to know that if you liked those things, you're psychotic. But we'll get there. So Matt and Tai are shooting the shit in a bar, drinking beers, and being Adults with Adult Problems like deciding what their graduate thesis will be. They have pawned Agumon and Gabumon off on other members of the DigiDestined because they can't imagine having their Digimon with them while they're doing Adult Things in Adult Life. While my skin is crawling, someone sitting behind them collapses and goes into a coma. It turns out that that person was a DigiDestined and there is an artificial Digimon that is stealing their consciousnesses and their Digimon for unknown reasons. An American Digimon researcher named Menoa shows up and she knows a lot about the threat posed by this artificial Digimon she has dubbed Eosmon because of a contrived allusion. Tai, Matt, TK, and Izzy go with their Digimon go into the internet to confront Eosmon. What follows is a fight scene within the internet that is superficially reminiscent of the end of the first movie, only with way less interesting than that, and notably less interesting than the meaningless fight we just saw. TK and Izzy hardly even participate, instead sitting back while Greymon and Garurumon fuse to become Omegamon because that form has just become a default strategy at this point. This is a good time to point out that, No, there are no women present at this battle. Kari and Angewoman participated in the opening fight scene and promptly exited the narrative. Sora's only role in this is to stare longingly out the window while saying she "decided not to fight." Mimi is the first member of the original cast to be knocked out by Eosmon, and her predicament serves to further the men's arc of dealing with the issue on their own. Yolie from 02 appears, and is the one who "pawns off" a contact request from Menoa to Izzy so he can handle it instead of her. Do you see where I'm going with this? This movie's idea of women growing up is for them to sit back and let men take care of the serious problems, and that is seriously their only "positive" stab at the subject. That aspect of this story only gets worse. So Omegamon wipes the floor with Eosmon because that form is Super Badass, but they cannot win because this is the end of the first act. Just before Omegamon can deal the final blow, Omegamon splits in two. Eosmon escapes and the DigiDestined retreat to figure out what's going on. What's going on is literally just that Matt and Tai have become Adults, and so now their digivices have countdown clocks to the moment when Agumon and Gabumon will disappear forever. Why was this never mentioned before? "Because it's like how nobody talks about the inevitability of death." No, really. Jennai—clearly the person from Tri who was merely masquerading as Jennai raised from the dead as a young man (like he also masqueraded as the Digimon Emperor Ken) because he was the primary antagonist of that series and the last Tri movie ends with a sequel hook that establishes that he is definitely still a villain, but Kizuna is ignoring all of that with no explanation—comes out of the Digital World to speak to Tai as a friend. This villain suddenly appears to Tai as a friend in the real world, something we have never seen him do so casually, and tells Tai that he knew this would happen all along. The only reason he didn't inform them was because he equated it to death. I'm not even going to bother explaining how irresponsible that is. It's like not telling someone that their dog will die, only their dog is a person with whom they can talk and form a mutual relationship indistinguishable from any other person, so they grow up unprepared for the sudden inevitability of death. It's just not a realistic scenario. It's a constraint invented to suit the vile themes of this movie and serves only to make those themes seem like inevitable natural laws. Only they aren't. They literally made it up. And their in-universe explanation for why this happens? That's just the cherry on top of this shitshow. The eventual disappearance of a Digimon is not merely an age thing. Digimon gravitate towards their DigiDestined as children because children have "infinite potential," and that potential decreases as time goes on and they gain more adult responsibilities. When they become adults in the eyes of this natural law system, their connection is broken and the Digimon disappears. If this WERE an age thing, it would still be offensive and terrible, but the fact that it is NOT an age thing just makes things worse. We'll get there pretty quickly. First, I just want to point out that other Digimon stories have created reasons that Digimon and their DigiDestined partners split up. Tri alone separated partners both by killing off Digimon and also sending them to the Digital World that was then rebooted, wiping the Digimon's memories. This story about separating Digimon and their partners was stupid then and it is stupid now, because Digimon is about building bonds with people, not breaking them. But AT LEAST those other stories, including Tri, weren't trying to pass off broken relationships as the result of natural laws that the (few) adults in the room just never talked about. Leomon did not die—specifically in Digimon Tamers—for Kizuna's bullshit plot contrivance in service of its bullshit story's bullshit themes. Oh, God, but where the fuck was I? While Tai is getting a talk from the character proving how pointedly we are ignoring the events of Tri, Matt basically becomes a secret agent and starts investigating the American Digimon researcher named Menoa and her assistant. Because Eosmon's coma attack can reach them through their internet-connected smartphones, he buys burner phones for himself, Tai, and Izzy. (By the way, they updated the digivices to be smart phones without a word explaining this and they don't even bother to do anything with that except make them a vector for Eosmon to hurt them. But the original digivices still exist and they are connected somehow. They did this Because Growing Up Means Modernizing, I guess. Tell that to your gender politics.) So then Matt contacts Ken, Davis, and Cody from 02, who happen to be in New York for unrelated reasons, which happens to be the city where Menoa's research university is. You were mad, like me, that the 02 kids were teased for appearances in Tri and then ignored for 6 movies in a row? Here's your begrudging, minimal inclusion. They are gophers checking out a few things for the original team, because they are coincidentally in America at the time. They also have some quick fight scenes connected to the final fight, but they are otherwise uninvolved. This is the Tai and Matt show now. Matt's investigation reveals that Menoa was a DigiDestined and a child prodigy. She lost her "infinite potential" when she went to college at 14 years old. This is the black hole where whatever Kizuna's theme is supposed to be completely breaks down. If Digimon are powered by the DigiDestined's "infinite potential," then why did Menoa's Digimon disappear when she was 14 just because she went to college early? She has every opportunity at that point. We are told she is wicked smart, that she received validation in the form of early college, and she has her whole future ahead of her. We even know that she eventually actually got a research job at a university studying her area of interest, which is next to impossible. In exactly WHAT WAY does Menoa lose her potential at just 14 years old? Not addressed. And it invites us to consider the rest of the main cast by similar metrics. Why isn't Izzy, who runs his own company as an adult, Too Adult to have a Digimon? Why isn't Mimi, who began supporting herself as an actress during 02 Too Adult to have a Digimon? Why isn't Sora, who has suddenly decided to not be involved with the fighting because she has dedicated her life to flower arrangements Too Adult to have a Digimon? Why, of the characters we know, does this problem ONLY impact Matt, Tai, and Menoa when they're about to graduate from university? Well, Joe is a resident at a hospital, so it can't be tied to school specifically either. The only thing we're left with is that this natural law that prevents all partnerships between DigiDestined and Digimon from outliving the DigiDestineds' childhood just exists so the creators of this movie can loosely tie the movie to the idea of growing up without actually expanding on what they mean by it. Only the end result of a "heartstring-tugging" "graduation" -esque storyline matters. Nothing about what any of these symbols actually means matters. But Matt is satisfied with "Menoa lost her Digimon when she was 14" for some reason, even though it should raise the further question of why the worldwide DigiDestined have never reported their Digimon disappearing before. The main cast was around 10 when they got their Digimon. They are now in their early 20s. If Menoa got her Digimon after them, because of the events of the original series and 02, and lost them within that time, then there is no way she was the only one. This would be an incredibly traumatic experience that would have happened to many people by now, and they absolutely would have heard about it if the DigiDestined community is so close-knit that they meet up and Izzy has a list of every known one. For plot progression reasons, Matt becomes suspicious of Menoa's assistant. He is apparently operating under an alias and hiding his research data according to the 02 kids in America. He confronts the assistant and learns that this man is, in reality, a special agent of the FBI. Yes, that's right. This fucking cop is a good guy and the DigiDestined will be working with THE UNITED STATES FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATIONS. The real villain is Menoa, who contacted them because she wanted to steal their list of the DigiDestined worldwide. (And she worked with them in that initial fight against Eosmon, her creation, because... Don't Think About It.) When she does this, she steals Izzy's consciousness like she did Mimi's, and also Kari and TK's because they're not allowed to be part of the narrative anymore. In fact, the only member of the original DigiDestined who is not involved at all in this is Sora, who's busy looking out her window and holding Biyomon because she chose flower arrangements because she's a Good Woman, I guess. With these names, Menoa changes her hair and gets Crazy Eyes to indicate she's now Bad. She accelerates her plan to steal the consciousnesses of all the worldwide DigiDestined by infesting the world with Eosmon drones. So it's about time to talk about WHY she is doing this, right? In-universe, it's because she's bitter about the loss of her Digimon and is sending all of the DigiDestined to a place within the Digital World called Neverland. Here, they revert to childhood and may live with their Digimon forever. This is where we Mei and Meicomon from Tri, because they were captured, too. Out-of-universe, the reason Menoa is doing this is that she's a ham-fisted avatar for fans who don't want the series to change and progress. She is a strawman making people who didn't like Tri out to be, as I said at the top, psychopaths with Peter Pan complexes. Moreover, this is another nail in this movie's sexist coffin. Not only is she a Duplicitous Woman Villain in this coming of age story squarely about boys, she is an unreasonable woman character who cannot let go of her childhood. She is infantalized along with every real person she represents, but particularly women. Nothing she does, or Matt and Tai do in response, makes sense outside of this obvious, fan-hating, masturbatory context. For one thing, we're never actually given a reason for why her proposed solution is categorically, universally "bad" aside from the fact that it violates the Natural Order of Things introduced to this 20-year-old series by this fucking movie. It's clear that she is doing this without the people's consent, which is wrong, but what she is promising them is eternal life with someone we understand to be their closest friend. It is implied that each pair exists in a separate world that is not connected to the others, but that issue could be rectified immediately by just connecting them. I wouldn't necessarily want to live in it, but if it meant that I would never be separated from MY CATS I would consider it, let alone if it prevented the disappearance of one of my closest friends. So, what, exactly, would be Wrong with consensually creating an immortal DigiDestined utopia? Never addressed. What we get instead is Matt and Tai attacking Menoa because She's Crazy and she kidnapped their friends and she's Violating the Natural Order. Tai and Matt, who represent the Adults In The Room now, are then attacked in turn by their friends who have become children. Menoa says that she is not controlling them, and that this is their free will. However, the DigiDestined children are portrayed as mindless specters with red eyes indicating they share, at best, a sinister, Borg-like collective will. Matt and Tai are then literally held back by these children in one of the most on-the-nose shots I've ever seen. Kizuna is making the argument that Digimon as a series is held back by adult fans' affection for the original series, and that the characters should be allowed to age and grow. It is doing so by weaponizing images of the characters from when those fans liked them best against the new movie creators' vision. In a movie that fans, like me, only came to see because that original version existed 20 years ago. They lured people in to this, took their money, and then spat vacuous insults at them for an hour before blaming those fans for the show's poor reputation. Maybe, and I'm just spitballing here, Tri was a fucking awful series that wasted time for three years without resolving anything. Maybe it has nothing to do with a Peter Pan complex, and they just didn't like what you made. Maybe, even if you thought Tri was good, you don't have to make a whole sequel movie equating people who didn't like it to someone who is so bitter that she's lost her mind, in which you also ignore the entire plot of Tri. I just don't understand the point of stories like this. Do they think that children are completely sub-human and incapable of discerning between good shows and bad shows, let alone good morals and bad morals? As if it's impossible to re-evaluate a show as an adult and still enjoy it. Do they think kids' cartoons aren't made BY ADULTS, somehow? Including, this time, themselves? Because they sure as fuck stamped this story with all kinds of (vague) messaging about the Proper Roles of people in society as if this was a story written By (Boring) Adults, For (Boring) Adults. They expected people who enjoyed the older series to pay for the privilege of being called immature psychopaths, and bring their kids along for the ride. But, Christ, how else would this shitshow end but with Matt and Tai restoring the children to their proper ages and destroying Neverland. Menoa is arrested by the FBI because, I cannot stress this enough, part of growing up is APPARENTLY working with AMERICAN COPS. We get scenes with Tai and Agumon, and Matt and Gabumon, that I'll talk about. But, otherwise, the movie ends with nothing resolved or changed about the other characters because they were barely characters in this to begin with. Kizuna was the Matt and Tai show to the bitter end. In order to defeat Menoa, they even unlock a brand new "Last Evolution" for Agumon and Gabumon that represents the fact that they have accepted Adulthood. And neither these new forms, nor the fight itself, even looked good. But wait one fucking second, you piece of shit: If the Digimon get weaker as their partners get older and lose their "infinite potential," then why is the resolution of this movie that two people who are about to lose their Digimon because they are now Adults *without potential* unlock new and more powerful forms for their Digimon? Why does Matt and Tai losing their potential, their Digimon's power source, make their Digimon stronger by unlocking a new digivolution? Because this movie isn't interested in making any fucking sense. It is only interested in preaching its bullshit ideas about what "growing up" means. But it's so uninterested in saying anything cogent about "growing up" that it doesn't even bother to explain how "growing up" is GOOD when it means losing this infinite potential that children have to empower Digimon. I mean, even Beyond how little this movie says about what "growing up" means and how firmly it believes in strict roles for adults, including the diminished place of women in Adult society, it doesn't even bother to explain the most obvious thing. Where do the vanished Digimon go after their DigiDestined partner becomes an adult? It equates this to death, which is absolute nonsense as I said before. But, sure, let's take that at face value. Digimon death has been explored in previous Digimon series. We know exactly what happens. They are reincarnated as Digi-Eggs. They sometimes retain all of their memories of previous lives. Originally, DigiDestined had to go to the Digital World to be paired with Digimon and Digimon could not leave outside special circumstances, so were there just generations of humans living in the Digital World and becoming adults such that this process would be well-known to the Jennai Imposter? NO. DEFINITELY NO. WE MET MEMBERS OF THE *ORIGINAL* DIGIDESTINED IN TRI, and they were, generously, in their 30s. Even if time is weird in the Digital World, there's NO WAY that this has been a well-documented occurrence because not all of the Original DigiDestined's Digimon SURVIVED to their adulthood, and we may surmise that they left the Digital World and their Digimon behind before they became adults. If they did remain together, why weren't Digimon introduced to the real world sooner than the climax of the first Digimon Adventure show? Does that imply the opposite assumption, that some of them stayed in the Digital World until they were adults? If so, then what happened to them after they became Adults? Did they return to the real world? Did they remain in the Digital World without their Digimon? If they're still in the Digital World, what happened to them when the Digital World was rebooted during Tri and the Digimons' memories were erased? It raises so many fucking questions that will never be answered because they didn't bother to think beyond the confines of this horrible story's horrible message. Aside from those considerations, which I admit edge towards fan wank, we definitely DO know that the Digimon reincarnation process can be interrupted by dying in the real world. This is one known way they may die permanently. If the end of their partnership means that a Digimon dies, then why the FUCK did they not work out a way to return Agumon and Gabumon to the Digital World, so they could be reincarnated via a process we have already seen? There is no reason. What about the fact that we saw all of them, at the end of Digimon Adventure 02, living with their Digimon as adults? There is no reason that was ignored. They just wanted to end this movie with an allusion to Angel Beats, with Tai and Matt crying over the deaths of their Digimon because that means it's time to grow up. This parting is allegedly supposed to be a good thing for them, according to the internal logic of the movie, but which is depicted as a tragedy in a desperate attempt to make people feel something. Apparently, it worked, because this garbage is overwhelmingly popular and people felt like it had something relevant to say to them. In my estimation, fans of Kizuna have also accepted the lie that the world can only get worse. People who believe in the ideology of this movie voluntarily place themselves beyond help and stand in the way of other people who are still willing to do the work to make things improve. This movie is not deep. It is reductive in the extreme for the sake of its hopelessness. It is preying on the indoctrination people are constantly assaulted with that Adult Life means becoming like everybody else and going through the motions dictated by a society that will brook no dissent. If you do not comply, you reject the Natural Order of Things and are detestable. Should I even bother to respond to such a toxic idea? People do not need to be shackled by the dogmatic expectations of society. People are allowed to still like shows that they liked when they were kids, especially when those shows were as thoughtful as Digimon Adventure was. For that matter, Adults are still allowed to like childish things and engage with them in whatever way that they want to. The only thing that's inappropriate here is the Kizuna team leveraging Digimon Adventure to give the middle finger to fans when those fans can't even respond by making a Digimon Adventure story themselves. I just honestly hate living in a world where it's in vogue to revive things people enjoyed when they were kids just to remind them that their lives suck now. It's such a betrayal and an abuse of power. Imagine if we lived in a world where people who actually enjoy stories were allowed to write sequels to those stories. Imagine if our stories and cultural heritage weren't monopolized by joyless creeps who are only interested in using that power to spread their fucking hyper-conformist, sexist, depressing, "conservative," "realistic" propaganda. Abolish copyright. Abolish whoever is responsible for the last several years of Digimon content. Abolish weebs who are willing to drink piss like this then spend the rest of their lives hyping it up to get other people to drink piss. This movie made me feel my first emotion in months that wasn't directly connected to the ongoing COVID pandemic, and that emotion was Blinding, Unyielding Rage. Digimon Last Evolution Kizuna is the worst movie—in concept AND execution—that I've seen since The Last Jedi, for many reasons similar to The Last Jedi. I'm not gonna say it's *worse* than The Last Jedi because I was actually able to finish Kizuna. But that's the only reason. And is that really an accomplishment on their part if I watched the last third of Kizuna at 4x speed and it still felt plodding? I would have sped it up even more, but VLC cuts off the audio after that point. So I learned one new thing out of this fresh reminder that I live in a Joyless Hell with people who revel in living in a Joyless Hell.

I am a filthy, dirty digimon fan and have been since I was a kid. I know that inherently, this is probably a bad movie if you aren't a fan. But is meant for the fans who have been here since the start. I watched the movie first, in '08, then the original adventure, adventure 02 and tamers. This was built for me. I cried, I laughed, I yelled in shock, I shouted about my waifu Kari and my husbando TK. Quality content all around. I enjoyed every minute, and that is in the end, what matters. No matter how high-brow my anime tastes get,I will always enjoy this. Goodbye, Original Digidestined, and the 02 cast. You made my childhood, and growing up with you was astounding.

This is a great movie and a beautiful sendoff to this franchise and the kids who grew up with it. There is honestly nothing else like it, other kids' anime don't have the guts to do an ending like this but this one nailed it. I loved how on character the cast was and how torn up Yamato and Taichi were about their future and their bonds. I think the art-style of the movie is phenomenal. The animation is surprisingly very very good, they stayed true to the original designs and made the characters truly look like their older version from the firstseason. The character designs are also just amazing. They look exactly as you would expect them to look, the outfits they are wearing fits their personalities and they actually fixed Yamato/Matt's hair to look like his original self which is a much needed addition. This movie destroys Tri and any other digimon adventure sequel as far as character designs are concerned and even the story, of course. I think the story feels rushed at times some of the main characters hardly do anything and one of the main three characters Sora does absolutely nothing in the entire movie she is hardly even shown. The story still felt pretty good and very emotional but they just rushed it without properly giving every character a great moment and screen time and that just ruined it quite a bit for me. The ending itself is brilliant but some characters not getting their screentime did leave me a bit upset. It still does Taichi and Yamato so much justice so I would say that alone is more than enough for most diigmon fans. Overall I loved the movie. I highly recommend every Digimon fan to check it out.