I am watching some anime magical girl transformations and like, Digimon Frontier had better transformation sequences than most of these. At least they had the essential steps: Visually appealing disappearance of clothes, Blank Canvas silhouette hopefully doing some cool poses and shit, and New Outfit Appearance.
In Corrector Yui, the titular characters' original and prism elemental suits are the closest to perfect I have seen, still not quite perf though because it's the 90's and there's some Weird Shit going on there.
In Digimon Frontier, the transformation starts with a badass-coded gesture, then the clothes disintegrate in a digital wind in a way that looks like they burned up. We are left with the kids' silhouette and the DigiSpirit behind them, then there's code wrapping around the digidestined and the armor pieces shape around 3Dish representations of the extremities, then form a lattice that is applied like 2 sheets converging into the blank slate that is the digidestined, and with a flash of the DigiSpirits' Element, the fully evolved digimon appears.
I admit, as far as the Appearance of the New Form goes, it is somewhat underwhelming, but it does better than many magical girl transformations I've seen. Anime these days doesn't even bother with showing the disappearance and reappearance of clothes in satisfying ways. They just have their normal clothes become light and stay there? Cowards. The clothes must disintegrate or vanish in light rays, leaving the subjects' silhouette, and then cool visual elements come to deposit the new costume on, like ribbons wrapping around the arms and joining into sleeves or light beams taking the form of skirts and visually gaining the weight of fabric for it to be satisfying. And flowers blooming or armor elements pressing together around the person's limb.
There are some of these elements present in, say, Precure when they draw the clothes on, but the lack of a silhouette blank canvas and clothes disintegration pretty much kills them for me. Symphogear has a split second of silhouette, but they don't have enough visually interesting stuff when putting on the basic suit and they don't always have a good disintegration step, though I do admit the rest of the transformation is really cool. The magical girl transformations in Madoka Magica and related material were a big disappointment, because despite the amazing animation and visuals they did none of the Essential Steps, it all happened in-between clothed silhouettes or interesting transitions, and I cannot help but imagine how much cooler it would've been with the Steps added. This is why the Digimon Frontier transformations are better than any Precure transform I have seen. In this essay I will-
Digimon Frontier's transformation was like a mix of tokosatsu armor-up and magical girl-esque henshin transformation done great, which is why it was so good.
