Man, Digimon Adventure 02: The Beginning has me so conflicted. I've grown up with the series and have a strong attachment to it, even though I do feel Digimon Adventure 02 is one of the weaker seasons for a variety of reasons. I will admit that I've only seen the first two Tri movies and haven't seen the Kizuna movie, mainly because I hear those movies really screw around with the lore that the TV series established, made the cast act really out of character, and didn't treat the 02 cast well. So when it was announced that the 02 kids would get a thirdmovie dedicated to them, Digimon fans were pretty hyped, seeing it as the producers apologizing for how badly they shelved the 02 cast when the Tri movies were being made. But I started to get worried when it was announced that the movie would focus on a new character who is apparently the actual first official DigiDestined. How would that even work? Didn't Tri already do that? But Digimon Adventure 02: The Beginning was released into the wild, and...it's better than I expected it to be, and I did enjoy it quite a bit, but it's really held back by really questionable decisions.

After the events of Kizuna, the cast of Digimon Adventure 02—Davis, Yolei, Cody, TK, Kari, and Ken—are going about their lives and following their passions. One day, a gigantic DigiEgg appears at the top of Tokyo Tower, and a mysterious message appears all across the world: "May everyone in the world have friends. May they each have a Digimon." Other than that, it doesn't do anything over the course of the week, so the public considers it pretty harmless. Later, a mysterious man tries to climb Tokyo Tower to make contact with the egg, only to slip and fall. After he's saved by the kids and their Digimon, the man in question, Lui Ohwada (Yes, his name is actually spelled that way), explains that the giant DigiEgg is actually his old partner Digimon, Ukkomon, and that he is apparently the very first human to ever officially partner with a Digimon. The revelations and potential crises that follow will put everyone's relationships with their Digimon to the test, especially since Lui doesn't believe that humans and Digimon can ever truly be friends after what he himself has experienced.

Okay, I'm going to get the positives out of the way first, as I actually did enjoy this movie quite a bit. Way more than I expected considering all that I've heard about both Tri and Kizuna, so don't take this or my rating to mean that I hate this movie, because I don't. Even though 02 isn't one of my favorite seasons, I did enjoy seeing the cast again, and it helps that Davis has become a lot less obnoxious and actually develops in this movie! The animation is great and I really appreciated that ExVeemon and Stingmon's DNA digivolving sequence—which had always been done in 3D in the series—was done in traditional 2D animation here. The music was really nice too, and even though I haven't heard the 02 music much since I haven't seen that season in Japanese yet beyond Hurricane Touchdown, it was used to great effect. And I enjoyed Lui and his story! I liked that The Beginning wasn't about saving the world from getting destroyed by a Saturday morning cartoon villain and that the villain in question isn't even a bad Digimon, just someone who didn't realize why their way of going about things was bad. I loved all of that, I liked Lui's character writing and his backstory, and the psychological and horror themes were also really well done!

Seriously, I want to rate this movie so much higher than I am, so much higher...if it wasn't for the fact that The Beginning seems to be on a mission to completely ignore/retcon every single rule that the first two TV series established in regards to its lore! For one thing, Ukkomon is somehow able to give Lui one of his eyes, and this should not be possible because Digimon are not flesh and blood beings, just packets of data, and if Digimon die in the real world, they cannot be reborn. This was already established with Wizardmon's death in the first Adventure anime! But my biggest beef with The Beginning is that it claims that Ukkomon alone is responsible for not only the creation of Digivices, but the existence of DigiDestined as a whole, which is also not true. One of the episodes of Adventure established that a group of humans created the Crests and Digivices when Homeostasis scanned the data of the children who saw the Greymon/Parrotmon fight years before the events of the series. Hell, there was a group of DigiDestined that came before the Adventure cast, two of which were prominent characters in Tri, yet this movie tries to claim that Lui is somehow the very first DigiDestined, which completely goes against continuity! Like...why ignore the series' most basic lore? Why couldn't Lui just be a regular person who just happened to have problems with his Digimon, like with Willis in the Golden Digimentals movie? Willis didn't need to be made into this super special DigiDestined kid in order for his story to be compelling. Say what you will about Golden Digimentals' own continuity issues, at least you can chalk that up to having different staff from the TV series that didn't realize certain events in the movie would conflict with the TV series. Seriously, the whole movie could have been just Lui asking the 02 kids for help with Ukkomon and it would have been better off.

It sucks that I can't like this movie more than I do, because there is a good story in there that has a lot of potential, but it's completely bogged down by the creators' attempts to completely ignore already established lore and continuity to make Lui more special than he really needs to be. Not to mention poor Angewomon gets completely nerfed and she doesn't get to do anything for the rest of the movie. My only other issue with the movie is with its English dub, which for the most part is good...but who the hell thought it was a good idea to make Robbie Daymond give Armadillomon a voice that makes him sound like Donald Duck?! I don't know if this was their attempt to be more faithful to Armadillomon's Japanese voice, but it really doesn't work here, and I say this as somebody who is a huge fan of Robbie Daymond! It really says a lot when Wayne Grayson of all people somehow manages to do a better take on Armadillomon than this English dub did, and Grayson's only in the recent re-dub of Golden Digimentals! Poor Robbie Daymond, you deserved so much better.

Overall, Digimon Adventure 02: The Beginning is an interesting experiment that I actually did enjoy to an extent, but again, its complete lack of interest in respecting its own lore and established continuity results in it being a very flawed experiment at best.