'Digimon' Announces 20th Anniversary Celebration

The Digimon franchise will soon be celebrating its 20th Anniversary in a pretty big way with a new film aging up the original cast of the series. So in order to properly celebrate such a big moment, the franchise is setting up a pretty big event.

This Summer, the franchise will be holding a special DigiFes at the Maihama Amphitheater on July 28 in Japan with staff and actors from the series planned to be in attendance.

Unfortunately, there's no concrete information at the moment as to who exactly will be in attendance, but one important confirmation is that the franchise will be revealing more information about the upcoming anniversary film tentatively titled Theater Version Digimon Adventure.

The new film will be ageing the original Digimon Adventure crew into their 20s, and bringing back Seki Hiromi, Katsuyoshi Nakatsuru, and Kenji Watanabe from the original Digimon anime to serve as Supervisor, Character Designer, and Digimon Designer respectively. For fans wondering how the new designs will turn out in motion, a previous article revealed that Katsuyoshi Natakatsuru was given specific directions as to how to design the older looks:

"We requested that Nakatsuru-san design these with more realistic proportions, as opposed to the designs from Adventure and 02...we wanted these designs to amplify the image of each of the children that we want to project to the audience, which would showcase what each of the children are doing now at their age and what their future goals are."

There's still much about the upcoming film still being kept under wraps such as the official title, concrete release date, and returning voice cast, but hopefully much of this will be revealed during DigiFes. There's also the question of where this new film will sit within the official canon, considering the previously released Digimon Adventure Tri shook up much of what fans previously knew about the anime series.

The Digimon series was originally conceived by Bandai, Toei Animation, and WiZ in 1997 as a way to capitalize on the virtual pet craze sparked by Tamagotchi. The franchise focus on its titular "Digital Monsters," monsters that live in a parallel, digital world that came from mankind's technology. The franchise had its first anime adaptation, Digimon Adventure, which focuses on a group of children known as the DigiDestined (or "Chosen Children" in Japan) that are transported to the world of Digimon and have to fight the various evil digital beasts that roam the land.

via Anime! Anime!