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Digimon: The Movie (2000)
More combat - even more comedy
Like other series-to-film adaptations, a little familiarity enhances the experience; but forget who-digivolves-to-what and "Digimon: The Movie" can be enjoyed just for the hilarious scripting and chimerical creatures.
No stirring oratory here; just off-the-cuff oneliners and the occasional heartfelt tirade. These are kids, not professional superheroes, and their suboptimal improvisations are played for max comedy; that, plus juxtapositions of the digi-dangerous and mundane (now with wheat germ!).
Sure, I'm a grizzled veteran of hard-SF, but the travel-sized Digimon in their pre-Champion phases are irresistably cute. Where else will you find a talking rabbitoid with inflatable prehensile ears, as devoted to its human partner as one of Anne McCaffrey's Pernese dragons?
Ditto for the first of the film's three acts, chronicling Japan's first Digimon incursion. Tousle-haired young Tai Kamiya (inseparable from his trademark goggles, even then) frantically tries to conceal a newly-hatched Digimon from Mom -- "we'll say it's a throw pillow." Little sister Kari merely thinks it's the greatest playmate ever, even when the gregarious bouncing pink head smooches them like a facehugger from the "Alien" films.
There's the obligatory 50%-combat-by-weight, of course, with several new Digimon and additional digivolutionary phases (many with a distinct "Evangelion" aesthetic). The film suffers by looking like an upscaled TV episode, as the fat black outlines and recycled transformations attest. The CGI'd zero-g combat-within-the-internet (now with ferris wheels!) is new, however, and fairly impressive. The dozen fragmentary songs in the soundtrack aren't particularly well-integrated with the plot (versus, say, "The Transformers: The Movie").
The Flight of Dragons (1982)
Nerd saves Land of Magic by thinking scientifically
Peter Dickinson-with-an-I's 1979 _The Flight of the Dragons_ (available on Amazon.com), on which the film's dragon visuals and biology are based, is a lavishly-illustrated analysis of what physiological characteristics dragons would have required to elicit the mythos surrounding them. The analysis is used to good effect in much of the dialogue of the film's bookish and bespectacled hero, Peter Dickenson-with-an-E, who inadvertently annoys the people of the Land of Magic (including several dragons) with cheerful comments such as "this is exactly how a 747 does it!" It's a little melancholy at the end, but great fun otherwise.