Nostalgia: Rewatching Digimon Adventure in Japanese

Back when I first became an anime fan about 10 years ago, I didn’t have cable TV or high-speed Internet, so I was stuck with watching mostly Americanized “kiddy” anime on local channels. Thinking back, many of these series were pretty dispensable. However, Digimon was one of my early favorites that I still enjoy even to this day…

Digimon was one of the many “monster collection” anime that sprung up during Pokemon’s initial success, though it was one of the more prominent ones. Unfortunately, it often got mislabeled as a blatant Pokemon rip-off. But anyone who’s actually taken the time to watch the series knows that it’s very different. The story and plot, the way the characters are presented, the themes that are brought up, the pacing – almost everything about it is different from Pokemon. Sure, they have some similarities (lots of anime series do if you think about it XD), but even the digimon and pokemon themselves are different from each other in many ways. But most will agree that Digimon is “darker” than Pokemon, and deals with more upsetting themes and violence than the latter does.

After Digimon was taken off local channels, I always wanted to watch it again in its uncensored, and obviously better, Japanese version. I managed to find a few random fansubbed episodes over the years, but recently I came across a batch torrent of the entire 54-episode Digimon Adventure series, which was the first series in the franchise. As of now, I’ve watched about half of it and am thoroughly enjoying it ^^

It’s not perfect, but in general Digimon Adventure is a unique and enjoyable family series. The concept of a digital world in the series is fascinating, and not too far-fetched considering the age we live in. The digimon themselves are perhaps more individualized and not as “cutesy” as pokemon; many of them are very well developed characters, whether they’re presented as lovable or wicked. The human characters are also great; even though they’re only elementary school kids in this series, we see each of their sides of sadness, anger, fear, and insecurity within themselves, their family, and their relationships with each other and their digimon. The 54 episodes go through different story arcs depending on where the kids are, what goal they have to fulfill, and which evil digimon they have to defeat. I loved the series when I used to watch it dubbed, and I’m loving it even more in Japanese =)

Now that I think about, the Digimon English dub was really not that bad compared to dubs of other anime on local channels. The casting was really good, and now that I’ve heard a lot of the voices in Japanese, many of their English counterparts sound almost exactly the same. Considering the sheer number of characters in the series, digimon and human alike, both versions provide a good variety of voices. Once I started watching it in Japanese, I was surprised to learn that some well-known seiyuus such as Takahiro Sakurai, Akira Ishida, and Junko Takeuchi are in it (Sakurai provides the voice for Tentomon, Ishida is Wizardmon, and Takeuchi, Naruto’s seiyuu, is Gomamon). The story/plot in both versions is the same, and character deaths and other saddening events were more or less kept intact in the dub. Even the names of most of the characters remained unchanged; despite sounding Japanese, most of the digimon names were the same in English, and for the human characters who had their names changed, they at least sounded similar to the Japanese names, i.e, Taichi to Tai, Yamato to Matt, Hikari to Kari. The only things the dub really suffered from were some scene edits, music and dialogue changes, and Americanization.

Although it wasn’t shoved down our throats that the characters were not from Japan, any scenes or dialogue involving Japanese customs such as hot spring bathing, flower arranging, Japanese food, etc, were changed or censored, and random American expressions, slang, or jokes were sometimes inserted into the characters’ dialogue. What irked me the most in the dub is when they would make a character say something sarcastic during a serious moment, which unfortunately is something that became more prevalent in the later Digimon seasons. And of course, a universal edit in “kiddy” anime is to add extra dialogue or background music wherever there’s a moment of silence in the original. Pokemon has it worse, but the Digimon dub suffers from this as well.

As for music, anyone who used to watch the Digimon dub probably remembers the infamous theme song…

I must admit, it is pretty catchy XD The dub uses that same song as the opening for three of the Digimon series, as well as the insert song for when the digimon evolve.

For Digimon Adventure (and the other series), the Japanese version uses nice songs with actual lyrics. Koji Wada’s lovely song, “Butter-Fly,” is the Digimon Adventure opening.

The equally talented Ai Maeda (AiM) sings the majority of the Digimon ending songs (she’s also the voice for Mimi in the series). Here’s the second Digimon Adventure ending, “Keep On.” Sweet song, and the lyrics are very uplifting =)

With the exception of a few Digimon Savers songs, Koji Wada and Ai Maeda (AiM) sing all the openings and endings for the five Digimon series.

All in all, Digimon is probably the best post-Pokemon monster anime that was released back in the day. Although it will probably always be thrust in Pokemon’s shadow among U.S. fans, the two are as different from each other as any other series that happen to be in the same genre. If you still enjoy watching kid/family adventure anime, you might want to give it a try XD I’m looking forward to watching the rest of this 1999 classic =)

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Omake: Here’s some old Digimon Adventure fan art I had on my hard drive. It was so long ago, I have no idea where I got them from XD