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Digimon: Digital Monsters
デジモンアドベンチャー
1999 · TV series · 22 min episodes · 2 seasons
AnimationActionAdventureScience FictionFantasy
While at summer camp, seven kids come across seven Digivices and are transported to a strange digital world. In this new world they make friends with creatures that call themselves Digimon who were born to defend their world from various evil forces.
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3 comments on Hacker News
>Summer Wars
Has any other director managed to get away with making the same film three times?
>A group of kids save the world via playing battle games in an ultra detailed 3D virtual world.
Now, is that Digimon (2000), Summer Wars (2008) or Belle (2021)?
If you replaced "The Hero's Journey" with the (Japanese-anime) word "Isekai", I get the same feeling here.
"Isekai" is the "Trapped in another world" trope that suddenly became popular for anime/manga in the last 10 years. But the basis of the story has been backwards-applied to Wizard of Oz, a Kid in King Author's Court, and even 90s shows like Digimon, Escaflowne, and .Hack//Sign.
Except "Isekai" as a concept didn't exist until relatively recently, within the past decade or so. There's no way Mark Twain was thinking of that concept when he wrote "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" over a hundred years ago.
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Furthermore, a lot of the tropes associated with the Isekai genre can be applied to plenty of other stories (including the Hero's Journey). Harry Potter, for example, hits overpowered main character, travel to effectively another world hidden amongst people (Hogwarts), magical / fantasy tropes (classical monsters), etc. etc.
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There are however, certain tropes and storytelling devices that are popular amongst people. When you take an "average person" and stick them as the main character, with few defining features... it allows for the reader / watchers to "self-insert" themselves as the protagonist.
See Harry Potter who comes from Muggle society, The Connecticut Yankee who represented a modern American from Mark Twain's era, Dorethy from Kansas, or the legion of Isekai protagonists from Kagome (Inuyasha), to Kirito (Sword Art Online). You give the main character a degree of wish fulfillment, including adventure, romance, and overall a positive and uplifting story. And a lot of people will like it. (The notion of "The Outsider" from Westerns and Japanese Samurai films also hits this trope)
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We can see that "The Hero's Journey" in fact follows a lot of similar patterns with "Isekai" itself even. Adventure is thrust upon the protagonist in the form of "The Isekai" moment (the moment where the protagonist is teleported to another world somehow).
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I think "The Hero's Journey" is largely the same. Its a backwards application being applied forwards. A concept created in 1944 that tries to unify stories from centuries or millennia ago, and tries to distill them into a singular "pattern" that works for today's audiences.
No different from "Isekai" these days (though on a shorter timescale: a concept from the past 15 years that very well could be applied to stories from 100 years ago). Now excuse me, I have some trash anime to watch...
EDIT: The trolls will joke that "Saving Private Ryan" is an Isekai. The WW2 front was a very different life, and the "Isekai" moment was getting off the boat and onto the shores of West Europe. They can't go back until they've accomplished their mission, so its an Isekai, trapped in another world.
I babysit a lot of my friend's kids (lacking kids of my own, I'm available for this) so I get to watch A LOT of children's TV. Perhaps its just an "in my day..." sort of bias but I do feel like the 90s were of higher quality than content of today.
Most hit shows of the '00s till today are invariantly tied up in trying to peddle toys of some kind. Certainly older shows were used for merchandizing but it seems like today the toy comes first and the show is developed around it. Plot development is optional and stories need not build off one another or refer back to past episodes. Out of those the early seasons of Pokemon and Digimon weren't bad and there are certainly a few neat shows on Disney & Nickelodeon (The Fairly Odd Parents and Sponge Bob come to mind).
Aside from that it seems like a lot of shows lack the complex story telling of shows like Batman: TAS, Superman: TAS, Spiderman, Beastwars, Reboot, XMen, and the others mentioned in the article. While not really a kids show (seriously - watch this as an adult and its 10 times funnier), Freakazoid outdoes most content peddled to adult audiences.
Another thing I've observed that seems to be detrimental to animated shows is the rise of cheap soap opera style live animation in place of cartoons. Probably the biggest example is Miley Cyrus' early career (Hannah Montana, etc). These shows let companies monetize in more ways since you can create concert movies and albums and the fanbase will follow the actor/actress to multiple shows. Benda Song[1] has spent nearly a decade jumping between various TV shows on the Disney channel (and playing a pretty good 'crazy girlfriend' in the Social Network IMO). I'm sure there are many other examples (all the faces seem to look the same between Disney's shows) but she stands out to me since she's seemingly the only cast member my age in shows filled with 12-16 year olds.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenda_Song