A translation of the staff comments included in the “Digimon THE MOVIES 1999-2006” Blu-ray collection released on January 9, 2015, featuring comments from the following:
- Shigeyasu Yamauchi (director for Digimon Adventure 02: Digimon Hurricane Touchdown!!/Transcendent Evolution! The Golden Digimentals)
- Takahiro Imamura (director for Digimon Adventure 02: Diablomon Strikes Back and Digimon Frontier: Revival of the Ancient Digimon, Ornithmon!!
- Tetsuo Imazawa (director for Digimon Tamers: The Adventurers’ Battle)
- Tetsuya Nagamine (director for Digimon Savers THE MOVIE: Ultimate Power! Activate Burst Mode!!)
- Hiromi Seki (producer for the Digimon Adventure, Digimon Adventure 02, Digimon Tamers, Digimon Frontier series, and movies Digimon Adventure, Digimon Adventure: Our War Game!, and Digimon Adventure 02: Digimon Hurricane Touchdown!!/Transcendent Evolution! The Golden Digimentals)
We’ve collected comments from the movies’ directors, and the producer who helped set up the TV series and movies, about each movie’s “things to look out for” and the “memories” they had from back then!
Shigeyasu Yamauchi
Digimon Adventure 02: Digimon Hurricane Touchdown!!/Transcendent Evolution! The Golden Digimentals
I remember that we didn’t have time to go location scouting in America. That we had some very delicious food in Tateyama in Chiba in accordance with making the story. That, on our way back, in the mountains of Chiba, we did some very focused driving on the pitch-dark roads at night, and that it was quite a thrill until we could finally find some light. And the various conversations I had with Seki/Sakurada1/Yoshida2.
Tetsuo Imamura
Digimon Adventure 02: Diablomon Strikes Back
It was a work from an era when the words “cloud” and “Big Data” didn’t exist, nor Twitter nor LINE3, and children made free use of things like handheld phones and word of mouth, and ended up bringing forth what would now be called a flash mob, and you can feel a fresh sense of fun with it.
As someone from the Toei Manga Festival4 generation, I used The Great Adventure of Horus, Prince of the Sun as a reference, and, personally, I thought it was fun to include the part where the kids and the others hold out their devices and cell phones together.
I think we were able to make a movie that can push forward the children who will be paving the way to the next era.
Digimon Frontier: Revival of the Ancient Digimon, Ornithmon!!
I was called onto the project right after they’d already decided on the story, so I remember it being unusually difficult. In the real world, the world had just gotten out of the 9/11 incident, and so we took on the difficult challenge of thinking about what kind of story we should be telling the children. The way the Digimon franchise carefully interweaves the real and virtual worlds is one of its greatest highlights, but as a result of 9/11, it felt like the real world’s affairs had more of an impact on this movie. This was around the beginning of CGI starting to get popular, and I regret that we may have put too much emphasis on it during the action sequences.
Tetsuo Imazawa
Digimon Tamers: The Adventurers’ Battle
The blue sky and the coral reef, the snorkeling Takato, Guilmon chasing the fish, and the Digimon playing around naturally in Okinawa were fun. It was also somehow very refreshing to do coaching for phrasing things in the laid-back and humorous Okinawa dialect during post-recording, and hear the lines spoken out that way. I would like you to look out for the pacing and development as the enemy suddenly appears, and all sorts of dangers approach, and they finally proceed to battle.
Tetsuya Nagamine
Digimon Savers THE MOVIE: Ultimate Power! Activate Burst Mode!!
It was a short 20-minute movie that would be screening alongside PreCure5, so we made it to be a movie where the Digimon became heroes and saved a young girl. We wanted Agumon to do his best and be the one to save the girl, but in the end Boss came and did everything for him, so it was all for nothing (laughs).
We went scouting in Yokohama multiple times for this movie, and even now, when I go to Yokohama, the image of giant Digimon fighting with each other floats to mind.
Hiromi Seki
“Back then”
I was told, from a certain person who has since passed, “each and every person will most certainly have a day when they’ll be so busy that they’ll feel like they want to die.”
“As you grow older, that day will be what you remember.”
I slept three hours on average per day. I didn’t know whether I’d have a single day off or not for a whole month, and no time to take sick leave.
When I returned late at night, the back seat of the taxi was practically like my bed.
It wasn’t just one day, but so many years, and then finally the days ended, and even more time passed, and the young people whom I met at the 15th anniversary event told me, “thank you so much for making this for us.“
They were adults with their own young children, and could say those words that made even an adult cry.
If being as busy as I was back then led to creating more memories, does that mean I’ve grown older, too?
I would like to ask that departed person, Kyoutarou Kimura (producer for Yomiko Advertising), that question.
Translator's notes
- Sakurada = Referring to assistant producer Hiroyuki Sakurada. [↩]
- Yoshida = Referring to scriptwriter Reiko Yoshida. [↩]
- A popular messaging app created by the Japanese subsidiary of the Korean company Naver, which is to this day still the dominant personal texting/messaging app in Japan. [↩]
- Toei Manga Festival = The original name given to the Toei format of screening short children’s movies back-to-back, usually tie-ins to their TV series. The name was used from 1963 to 1989, and has been rebranded several times since then; the Toei Anime Fair that the original Digimon movies screened at was one such incarnation. [↩]
- The Savers movie screened alongside the 50-minute We are PreCure Splash☆Star: A Tick-Tack Close Call!, a tie-in for the We are PreCure Splash☆Star magical girl series. [↩]