Digimon Storytelling and the Curse of Evolutions
While I am watching Beatbreak, I cannot help but think about one thing: How the evolutions in the way they usually are handled in the anime cursed the storytelling of the show - and how Beatbreak is so much better than your average Digimon anime so far for exactly this reason: they do not need to put in the evolutions.
For context: there is a simple reason why Digimon usually has those evolution sequences in there. And that reason is that Digimon in the end is a merchandise advertisement that usually does serial storytelling. But in the end it is merchandise advertisement, just as the PokΓ©mon anime, or your average magical girl or tokusatsu anime is. Or stuff like Power Rangers, He-Man, Transformers and so on were in the West. Those are mostly shows that invite kids to see themselves as part of the story and for pretend-purposes than buy some plastic bling-bling to basically cosplay in some tiny way. And while many of those shows had again and again really talented storytellers involved, those storytellers were always slaves to this ultimate goal: sell plastic bling-bling.
The evolution sequences, much like the transformation sequences in Magical Girl or Tokusatsu hence served to nicely frame the merchandise in question, with the added bonus of saving some animation money. After all, the evolutions were canned animation. Aka: animation that was done once and then reused every episode again and again with no or only minor alterations. In some really bad cases in PreCure, where the transformations got longer and longer over time, we had episodes with only 15 or so minutes of actually new animation per episode, because transformations and attack animations ate up the remaining 5.
To write for this, however, is a headache. Especially if you want to put in some symbolism for the evolution (in Digimon) or transformation (in Magical Girl or Tokusatsu). Because usually the company financing the show (which, let's face it, is most likely Bandai) will want you to have all those mini-advertisement clips established early on. So ideally you start the show up with a breakneck pace giving everyone the evolution/transformation. Every new episode a new one, so that these advertisements can be used. And this... makes the evolutions/transformations - at least the first ones - feel cheap. And it also makes the first episodes feel somewhat boring, as depending on the size of the team you will spend several episodes doing the same thing over and over again.
And frankly, if you want to write a show, having to write around the restriction that per episode you only have about 15 minutes of time that you can actually use for storytelling (as not much storytelling is happening in those sequences) is a hinderance too.
Sure, admittedly Digimon never was as bad in regards to the evolution stuff, as PreCure was at times in regards to transformation. I think the worst offending Digimon episodes have maybe around 2 to 3 minutes of canned animation. Many only have about 1.5 minutes or so, given that the evolution sequences tend to be shortened in most episodes, rather than playing in full. Still, it is something to work around.
One of the reasons that Digimon Tamers was so surprisingly good back in the day, was, that they introduced the Card Slash mechanics as another merchandise sequence, allowing them to pace the new evolutions differently. And given that the Card Slashs were at times shortened to just a few seconds they were not as much in the way of storytelling, as other evolution sequences.
And now we have Digimon Beatbreak. Which has a strange luxury that basically no other Digimon media had so far: it does not serve the primary purpose of being a merchandising anime. There is literally no merchandise out there, other than character merchandise. There is no Digivice that Bandai sells, no equivalent to crests, not anything.
We know by now that the main reason that Beatbreak exists is not Bandai asking Toei to make a new Digimon anime for merchandise, but that Toei had a free timeslot to fill and asked Bandai, if Bandai would like a new Digimon anime, given that they were right now creating a lot new Digimon stuff.
This is why we do not really have a Digivice this season. And because we have no Digivice, we have no Digivice merchandise to sell. Meaning: Yamaguchi and his folks actually have clearly very little limitations on how they have to tell the story.
Hence... Chiropmon and Geckomon do not have to evolve early on. We can actually build up to it. And we also do not have a scenario where through merchandising the evolutions are leaked before the show even starts. We really, really get to take our time with all of this, and the storytelling really profits from it.
Don't get me wrong: I freaking love the evolution sequences normally, and I love the insert songs in Digimon. It is easily one of the reasons I became so attached to Digimon as a kid. And young children especially do often like to watch the evolution sequences over and over again. I sure did.
Heck, from babysitting the neighbor's kids a lot, I can tell you: a lot of the very young kids back then (we are talking Kindergardeners) often had trouble following the overarching narrative, but man were they invested in the evolutions.
But as an adult rewatching? Uff, it is hard. Heck, as an adult watching the series for the first time it is really hard.
The only burden I see coming with this is: whenever Geckomon and Chiropmon eventually evolve, it should feel more "earned" than it would have needed to feel in a scenario where the evolutions were given to everyone in the first three episodes.
We will see if Beatbreak delivers. But so far? Fuck, I am so happy that they chose this approach.
