Growing up can be painful, especially if it means losing your friends, perhaps forever. That’s the dilemma facing Taichi “Tai” Kamiya, his human friends, and their digital monster pets, the Digimon. From elementary school to college, the “Digi-Destined” kids and their Digimon have battled various threats from the digital world. Now the kids have learned that, as they mature into adulthood, their digital partners will disappear. Though one human, Menoa Bellucci, has found a way to preserve their bonds—but is it the right thing to do?

This conflict is explored in the animated feature, Digimon Adventure: Last Evolution Kizuna, which wraps up 20 years of Digimon Adventure history. That includes Digimon Adventure (54 episodes, 1999-2000), Digimon Adventure 02 (50 episodes, 2000-2001, story takes place four years later), Digimon Adventure 02: Digimon Hurricane Landing!!/Transcendent Evolution!! The Golden Digimentals (featurette, 2000), and Digimon Adventure tri. [sic] (six feature films, 2015-2018; story takes place in 2005, three years after Digimon Adventure 02). Last Evolution Kizuna takes place five years after Digimon Adventure tri.

For 20 years, Joshua Seth has provided the English-language voice of the main hero, Tai. IMDb credits him with 86 voiceover projects in film, television and video games, including Tetsuo Shima from the Pioneer/Animaze dub of Akira (2001), Carl from Transformers: Robots in Disguise (2000), Hige from Wolf’s Rain (2003), Takeshi in Immortal Grand Prix (2003), a Prisoner in The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (2004), and Rio in the video game, Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee 2 (2007). Seth began live stage shows in 2006, touring the world as a magician and psychological illusionist. In 2015, he wrote a book on peak performance, Finding Focus In A Busy World: How To Tune Out The Noise and Work Well Under Pressure, which marked his transition from performing to motivational speaking and vocal coaching—though he continued to voice Tai for the Digimon movies. If Digimon Adventure: Last Evolution Kizuna was Tai Kamiya’s last appearance, then it would be Joshua Seth’s last performance as that character—the end of a 20-year journey for both.

Seth talked about his experience in a phone interview on September 29th, 2020, the day of Kizuna’s digital release.

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Bob Miller: It’s been 20 years for Digimon. Tai is a legacy character. How has your performance as Tai changed over the years? Has your voice changed at all, or did you have to compensate for the character’s growth and maturity?

Joshua Seth: As luck would have it, I chose to use my own voice for Tai, as you can hear. It’s pitched up a little bit when he was younger in the original series, but, it’s still my voice. So I never had to remember what it was that I did before. I didn’t change it in Kazuno because he’s supposed to be an adult.

I did my vocal exercises and breathing exercises like I’d do if I were giving a live show or keynote speech, which is what I do now. I did the exercise where I would expand and deepen and lower my larynx and my breath control and give me more resonance, so that Tai would sound more adult, and have a bit more gravitas in his voice. It’s still my voice, so, that’s why honestly I feel closer to Tai and Digimon than any of the other properties that I’ve voiced for years. It’s literally my voice. And I’m just lucky that the character I chose to connect to my real voice is one that people love.

BM: Have you compared your voice to the Japanese version of the character?

JS: That’s a great question. I never have. From time to time, producers and directors have offered to let me see the scene that was done in the original. I always decline, because I don’t my interpretation to be derivative of what any other actor ever did. After all, I want to bring my own interpretation to it. All I’ve ever asked is to listen to the music, because the music will clue you in to the pace and the tone and the feeling that the creators intended for that theme or that property that you’re the voice of. Never another actor’s interpretation.

BM: Okay, so you got carte blanche, then?

JS: In the featurette of the movie that comes with it, where they profiled me, they showed me changing up some lines [of dialogue] on the fly, and they’ve always been very open to that. The writer—whom I’ve known for over 20 years, Jeff Nimoy—he’s a very funny guy, and he’s great at writing scripts but there’s not a lot to be done. It stands on its own. But in the moment sometimes, I feel like I might phrase it differently or maybe the joke could be telegraphed differently here. Within the limitations of dubbing, of course there’s structural limitations with the time that we have to read, but they’re very good about at least letting me lay those tracks down and giving those alternate reads and interpretations and ideas. And of course it’s up to the producers and the directors and the editor to determine which take they’re going to include in the final item.

BM: On the featurette you mentioned you had a musical background. So, tell us about it and how musicality is attached to matching lip flaps AND to your performance.

JS: Well, thanks for asking that because I think it’s really important for voice actors to realize that voice acting is ACTING. It’s not just a matter of being a pleasing voice or doing a funny voice. It really comes down to your ability to connect the emotion to the character for the audience that is going to be interacting with your performance.

So, my background in musical theater taught me to use my voice as an instrument so that I could play all the different notes and find all those different colors and flavors that are capable of being expressed within it. And also finding the humor, the improvisational comedy, and the ability to tell the story in connection with all the other characters in a way that’s going to engage the audience. And be unique. That all comes from a background in theater, and specifically musical theater, because in musical theater you’re telling the story through a song. And you’re playing different notes in that song to express those different emotions. We can do that in speaking as well. We used to do that more often. If you listen to actors, the old-time Hollywood 40s and 50s actors where they, themselves, become characterizations. Like Bogart, for instance. It’s a style. That was actually his voice, right? Or Cagney in White Heat (1949), for instance. [as Cagney] “Yeah, you’ll never get me, coppers.” [as Edward G. Robinson, Public Enemy (1931)] “Actually, that’s Rico. No, Rico, R-I-C-O.” So if you hear that, until now, you think, “Oh, this hearkens back to Bugs Bunny. It sounds like early Looney Tunes. No, actually, this is how people sounded. They had a lot more character in their voices because now, emotion has been replaced by emojis.

It used to be we carried these long conversations with each other and connect with each other through the strength of our personalities as demonstrated by the quality of our style of speech. And when you learn to use your voice as an instrument like that, you can vary the pace, the pitch, the texture, the tone, and all the other vocal qualities and characteristics in such a way to make it more interesting and appealing as a voice actor.

BM: On the featurette you were talking about acting with your whole body in front of a mic. Why is that helpful?

JS: Because you’re voicing the body art of acting. Right now, I’ve been giving these interviews for hours today. And my voice sounds the same now at 3:00 in the afternoon where I am on the east coast as it did at 9:00 a.m. when I was talking in giving other interviews. So how am I able to maintain consistency throughout the day? Because I know how to link my body and my voice in such a way that everything is in alignment and nothing is strained. So the stress is gone. I learned this through a process called The Alexander Technique many years ago. And [Frederick Matthias] Alexander was a stage actor about a hundred years ago that had suffered vocal strain so bad that he couldn’t deliver his performances, and he figured out this method of posture and alignment so that you would be able to maintain the strength of your voice and project it to that microphone in the back of the theater back there, and to be able to maintain the strength of your voice throughout the performance. And I use that to this very day. I’m standing right now when I give this interview to you and I’m gesturing with my hands.

Oh, and the other reason is breath control. Because, when you’re sitting, when you’re slouching, you’re compressing your lungs and your diaphragm to the extent that you’re not getting the full source and power of which your body is capable.

BM: The featurette showed you using an iPad. It used to be you read from scripts on paper at recording sessions. The scripts were in paper. Now it’s on iPads. When did that happen and what is the advantage of having an iPad now?

JS: That happened when iPads got more widely adopted and got better battery life over the last few years. But I don’t think it’s an advantage. I think paper is an advantage, because I am from the old school where you take a pencil and you mark up your script. Again, voice acting is acting. When you get a script in the theater, you sit down with it, you do a read, and you mark it up, based on how you want to interpret it. Underlines. Circles. Accents. Breaks and things like that, to help you vary the quality of your read. When you look at everything on the screen, you have to keep those sorts of notations in your mind, or you totally just don’t do them at all, and all the reads sort of get flattened out along the way.

BM: Did you finish recording Digimon Adventure before the pandemic hit? Or did you have to resort to recording at home?

JS: Both, actually. I recorded pickup lines at home from my home office. I have a whole studio here, now, which I didn’t have before the pandemic. I bought a studio condenser mic and a Behringer mixer, got some software on my Mac. And I’ve actually done some virtual tune-up speeches for all over the world with Home Video Production Studio, which is so easy. It’s expensive to put together, now. I’m very happy with it, actually. I’ve been able to do this at home and just not sit here. I’ve been able to create something.

But the main recording of Digimon I did in Los Angeles right when the pandemic broke out. And in fact, the day that I flew to L.A. is the day [Mayor] Eric Garcetti shut L.A. down for the first time. And I didn’t know that this had happened. It hadn’t happened anywhere in the country at that point. So, it was bizarre, checking into my hotel in Burbank, walking out in downtown Burbank to get a bite to eat at a restaurant and finding out that all the restaurants had closed. I walked all the way to the mall. The mall had closed. I didn’t know what was going on. I came back and asked at the front desk, “Am I Will Smith in I Am Legend, or something? Because it feels like a ghost town. This is L.A. What happened?” They explained it was shut down for coronavirus. This was back in March, and then the next day I went into the studio and everybody’s running around with the scripts in their hands stretched out. “Stay away from me; I don’t want to catch this.” Not knowing what to do. Nobody had any guidance, yet. It wasn’t like it is now, where people are social distancing and wearing masks. That wasn’t even in the vernacular back then. But somehow we were able to get it done. And I was able to do the pickup lines at home and it all came together. All’s well that ends well.

BM: I saw your video on Twitter with your kids’ reactions to the new movie.

JS: Oh, fantastic. What a joy as a parent to be able to share this experience with them as a voice actor. I would take them to the movies when they were little and they would not put it together that it was me doing the voices. Like for instance, with Digimon tri. [sic], it was only when the tri. movie that featured me on the screen at the beginning,—I think it was Digimon Future, perhaps—that my daughter, who was five at the time, jumped up in the middle of the darkened theater and shouted, “Daddy, that’s you!” (chuckles) That’s when they put it together. That’s the first time they were both old enough to realize, yeah, that it’s me, and it feels so sweet to have them connect me as true fans of the series that are growing up with it the way a lot of fans did, starting 20 years ago.

BM: Do you reference their reactions as to how you perform Tai?

JS: Do I think about them when I perform? In a way. Because it changes you, being a parent. When I was younger and I voiced Tetsuo in Akira, I wasn’t thinking about how the ultraviolence in the movie might impact the viewer. I was just going with the story as it was being told. Now that I’ve got kids of my own, that’s forefront in my mind. And I’m just fortunate that the character that I voice is a good role model because Tai literally represents courage, which is a quest for courage, after all. And I’ve had countless people come up to me at comic cons over the years and send messages on social media, saying how Digimon helped them through a hard time in their childhood, and Tai, specifically, my character, representing courage, gave them the courage to rise up to challenges they had in their own lives. I’m just fortunate enough to be the representative of that kind of storytelling.

BM: Do you have any specific stories you can tell about that?

JS: These are personal stories of the fans, and honestly, some of them are really heavy. It seems incongruous of me that something as innocent as a cartoon could help somebody with the death of a parent, or going through chronic disease, or being hospitalized. These aren’t the common stories. The more common story is, “Hey, thanks for giving me a great childhood years ago; you’re the voice of my childhood.” People tell me that all the time, “You’re the voice of my childhood.” I say, “Thanks, that made me feel really old.” (chuckles) Because they’re 30, now, right? It makes me realize that I’ve been in this game a long time. Occasionally people will come up and say, “Hey, I was in the hospital and I just watched Digimon all the time and it made me happy. It gave me some happiness.” It means something to people all over the world.

BM: What more can you say about your performance in this latest Digimon Adventure?

JS: I just love the way that it came out. And I’m [glad] to have been able to provide consistency for Tai, this character, throughout this 20-year history, which still blows my mind. And, I’m grateful for the fans, for maintaining interest in it all these years. Because of them, we continue to make them, and hopefully we’ll—in some form or another—put out more in the years ahead.

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In the U.S., Shout! Factory released Digimon Adventure: Last Evolution Kizuna on Blu-ray Combo Pack on October 6th, 2020. It included a 20-minute featurette, “The Final Evolution: Remembering 20 Years Of Digimon Adventure,” spotlighting voiceover actors Joshua Seth (Tai) and Tom Fahn (Agumon) and their contributions to the franchise. The film had earlier been released in Japan on February 21st, 2020. Digimon Adventure was created by Akiyoshi Hongo, produced by Toei Animation in cooperation with WiZ, Bandai and Fuji Television.