Emma F
(Note: this review is based on the English dub) Third season, aka Digimon Tamers, is easily my favorite of all the Digimon series. When I finished watching that series, I found myself really missing it. So I watched the movies.If you liked Tamers, you'll like this (Particularly if you're a Takato/Rika shipper, though I'm a Ryo/Rika fan myself, and I still liked it tons).I won't go into to much detail on the plot, but this movie takes place after the end of third season. At the beginning of the movie, the kids' Digimon partners are back in the Real World (the movie never mentions anything about how they got back from the Digital World after the end of Tamers). A train Digimon named Locomon appears in Tokyo and is causing havoc. The Tamers have to post-pone a surprise birthday for Rika to try and stop it. The plot thickens from there. Along the way,a lot is revealed about Rika's backstory. This focus on character development is one of the things that makes this movie so good. That, and the fact that you get to see all the Tamers and their Digimon reappear to fight the bad Digimon.The dubbing, I felt, was perfectly watchable. About the same quality as the rest of the third season dub (which I thought was very good, especially compared to the first and second season dubs. However, if you didn't like the third season dub, watch the subtitled version).I only had a couple of problems with this movie.First is a scene where Rika sings. It's a really pretty song, and her English voice actress has an amazing singing voice (not surprising, since she's been in some Broadway shows). However, I found it a tad OOC for Rika (though to be fair, the ways its written into the movie, it's not as OOC as it probably sounds to someone who hasn't seen it and who knows what kind of person Rika is). I also thought that Rika's voice actress sang a little too well to be completely believable. I know that it's kind of weird for me to say that, but she sounds like a professional- which Rika is not. However, if you're willing to suspend your disbelief a little, you'll still enjoy the movie immensely. And if you're not, fast forward through that scene and you'll still enjoy the movie immensely.The only other thing I disliked was the pacing. It felt like they had taken a one-hour plot and compressed it into a half-hour movie. This made the story feel a little rushed, particularly towards the end. Also, it feels like they tried to cram in so many appearances of old characters, that some of them felt more like cameos than anything (especially Beelzemon and Ryo/Justimon. Each gets about 15 seconds to show up, blast some bad guys, say a couple cool lines, blast some more bad guys, then we move on to something else). Frankly, I felt that this plot deserved to be extend to a whole hour, so that there would be more time for character and plot development (Battle of Adventurers, on the other hand, could easily have been shortened to half-an-hour).Overall, if you liked Tamers even a little bit, WATCH THIS MOVIE.
