Didn't mean to leave it alone this long, but I just watched a little Adventure 02. Gonna post a review of every episode of this show on your VM page if it kills me.
Episode 21:
So yeah, this is easily the best episode of 02 if memory serves. An interesting thing writing-wise that I didn't remember was Wormmon telling Ken that he'll always believe in him before he tackles him off of Devidramon. Normally when "I'll always believe in you" is addressed at a character who's clearly doing evil stuff, it's when the speaker is justifying why they're blindly going along with all the evil stuff, but here it's Wormmon's justification for doing the opposite and sticking up to Ken. He's saying he'll always believe in Ken's capacity for redemption, not in the goodness of everything he happens to do, and so he'll endure Ken's abuse and risk retaliation to save him from himself. Also good writing-wise is the scene where Ken can no longer stay in denial about how Digimon are in fact alive. On one hand, this "video game" Ken thinks he's in is so lifelike that only someone with a warped mind could be as cruel as Ken was while playing it, but on the other hand most folks watching the show have done something like torture Sims or the customers in Roller Coaster Tycoon. It doesn't excuse him and the show doesn't try to spin it that way, but at the same time it forces you to think about how you approach video games and what that says about you.
What stuck out to me most about this episode though is the one brief shot where Chimeramon is destroyed. It's definitely my favorite shot in 02, and maybe in all of Digimon or close to it. Magnamon's little more than a tiny silhouette on the screen, but what makes it work is how it all scales. Magnamon: tiny, Chimeramon: huge, the irresistible, blinding power of Kindness: gigantic. And from a technical standpoint it's the perfect example of doing a lot with a little. It's just a flat, barely animated, totally cheap effects shot, but the composition just carries the whole episode. (Contrast this with tri where they throw all the money they can scrape together at higher-framecount effects animation that has no presence or sense of mass or composition and yes I'm still on about that.)
Btw, haven't watched latest tri yet but plan to.
Also, how've you been lately? It's been a while.