18th Anniversary of X-Evolution

[MarcFBR]

It's January 3rd in Japan, so today is the 18th Anniversary of when X-Evolution aired on television!

(Various text below has been used in prior anniversary articles.)


X-Evolution was based on Digimon Chronicle, the mini comic included with the Digimon Pendulum X V-Pets. It's an abridged and altered version of that story, with the most notable change being the removal of any human characters, which is still reasonably rare in Digimon stories.

Originally announced as a full length feature, a press release re-announced it as a TV special a little more than a month before it aired, with only some of the initially announced merchandise.


X-Evolution was directed by Hiroyuki Kakudou, well known to Digimon fans as the director of Adventure and 02.

The screenplay is credited to two writers:
Kazunori Ito, who worked on Dirty Pair, Ghost in the Shell, .hack, Patlabor, Urusei Yatsura, and a number of other well known franchises.
Miu Kawasaki, who worked on .hack (including various novels for the franchise) and Air Master.

Imagi animated X-Evo during their early upswing and it ended up being one of the few bigger projects they did that ended up being released.


While X-Evolution came and went reasonably quickly, it did end up getting a DVD later in 2005, some elements were used in Digimon World 4 (released as Digimon World X in Japan a couple days after X-Evo came out), and while various announced toys didn't ever appear after their initial announcement in a press release, the Digitalize Booster Pack for the Digimon card game had a large number of cards featuring characters from the movie (using their movie CGI renders), and Alphamon continues to get new products with X-Evolution branding, a big one being the Digivolving Spirits figure, plus the recent updated Figuarts and the Amplified model kit.

In addition, Digimon Chronicle, which X-Evolution was based on, got a sequel story to tie into the Digimon X V-Pets. With the US releases of the Digimon X and X2, even this is still relevant.


A few years ago X-Evolution streamed as part of DigiFes 2020 Online. As promotional fodder for that, we finally got a good high quality version of the poster art (embedded above.)

Last year we also got a good number of X-Antibody cards in the Digimon Card Game, including a set focused on them, plus a few new X-Antibody Digimon showing up during the year.



So despite coming and going itself relatively quickly, elements of X-Evolution still pop up a decent amount.

 

[Shelly]

I love that movie. I am glad that Dorumon finally is getting some spotlight.

I wonder they are rebooting X-Evolution as a sequel series to Tamers. I could see it will tie-in with Tamers,because I think it makes sense that they had introduced Antibody forms of the Digimon from Tamers.

I known X-Evolution and Digimon Chronicles are a separated series from Tamers,but I always felt they could be a sequel to Tamers to me. Even Digimon Chronicles and X-Evolution have similarities with Tamers.

Hopefully if the next series after Ghost Game will be a X-Evolution/Tamers crossover series, I would be happy. I would love to the series will focus on Jeri's little brother and Dorumon as his partner. Probably they will adapt Digimon Chronicles' storyline in the sequel series.

I hope we will see anime version of Dorumon someday. I think he would be cute like Guilmon.

 

[Mon-Ohma]

Still very much my favourite Digimon movie, as it shows the Mons themselves can carry off a dramatic narrative without the need for a human presence.

Its version of Alphamon is also far superior to the one from Tri.

 

[Unknown Neo]

That was some kind of movie. Only one without humans? But X-Mons are interesting. Sometimes they look really nice or fun and different.