After consulting the internet and watching far enough into Digimon Adventure 02 to be able to watch the first movie (well, the first dubbed movie, since this is essentially 3 originally separate short films in a trench coat) spoiler-free, I gave it a shot... and it wasn't particularly great. It isn't terrible or anything, and it has some good qualities for sure; but some fundamental structural issues make it just average overall. Starting with the good, the animation is a huge step up from the regular show, having this really nice watercolor style and the characters generally being a lot more fluid. The characterization was also top-notch, everyone feels like they're the same people from the show but "off the clock" so to speak; the dialouge is so much more expressive, which makes the kids feel more grounded when paired with the superior animation. Each of the 3 segments also have really solid action. Greymon and Parrotmon's fight in the first segment has this very raw quality to it, the lack of speech or explanation from either of them helps emphasize how confusing the whole situation is to the kids, and it being set during the night with only the digidestined witnessing what happened creates an eerie atmosphere. I can absolutely see how they could've been convinced it was a terrorist bombing. The second segment, meanwhile, has its main villain be defeated in a super creative way; using the flood of fanmail the kids are flooded with (oh the 2000s, when people actually sent email for fun) as a secret weapon by forwarding all of it to the evil internet digimon and slowing it down so much it becomes a sitting duck. The third segment's action is more typical and in-line with the show, but the animation is stellar and it's just very well executed.
As for the story... well that's where the problems start cropping up. See, the dubbed movie America got is actually 3 short films that released separately in Japan stitched together into a feature length film; and it's very obvious that the segments weren't originally the same story when watching. There's brief narration from Tai in-between the 3 segments "linking" them together, They're all good stories in their own right (though the third one suffers quite a bit from extensive cuts); but the film ends up feeling incoherent as a package because, well, it is. My favorite part of the film is the 3rd segment where the kids travel to the US and meet up with an American digidestined named Willis, who isn't part of a team but got 2 digimon instead of just one. We find out that one of those digimon, Cocomon, became evil because of a mistake Willis made; and the whole thing is about him learning to let others help him, ending with the evil part of Cocomon being purged and it being able to be reborn. It's a really sweet story, even with cuts. Thing is, it has pretty much nothing to do with the 2nd segment of the movie where Tai and Izzy use the internet to beat an evil digimon virus. Okay, technically the virus is what infected Cocomon, but the connection is about as thin as paper and feels incredibly forced. I wouldn't mind so much if the film just owned that it's an anthology, but the feeble attempts to make the 3 short films one story are incredibly distracting, make the movie incoherent, and take away from their unique identities and strengths. Ultimately, I enjoyed my time with the film; which is a testament to how good the original shorts are, but the way these independent stories were smashed together removed a significant amount of the impact and severely drags the final product down.