FILM IN REVIEW; 'Digimon' 'The Movie' (Published 2000)

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers.

Animation direction by Takaaki Yamashita, Hisashi Nakayama and Masahiro Aizawa

PG; 89 minutes

Simple-minded may be as good a word as any to begin a description of ''Digimon: The Movie.''

This spinoff of the children's animated television series ''Digimon: Digital Monsters'' is yet another effort to merchandise its popularity, adding one more garish product to a bazaar that already includes toys, clothes and trading cards.

If there is any taste left in the world, the buck may very well stop here.

On the big screen, ''Digimon'' comes off as noisy and ill conceived, long on morphing monsters, short on storytelling talent and uneven in its efforts at animation.

For those who seek intellectual treasure in this crudely carpentered Japanese dross about children and creatures from a digital world, comfort may be found in repetitive praise for the power of friendship and teamwork, although such lessons are taught far better in other children's fiction readily available this side of Oz.

On the other hand or claw or Godzilla-like foot, it should be noted that the little girls in ''Digimon: The Movie'' are represented mainly as vacuous party animals or budding sex objects. And the few adults, particularly a mother whose culinary repertory is inclined toward taste treats like liver sticks, are strictly buffoons.

In fact, the world inhabited by the children of ''Digimon'' is strangely devoid of adults, leaving battling monsters to devastate swaths of some city with Japanese street signs without intervention by the police, military forces or, for that matter, anyone who seems not to be possessed by a passivity attributable to too much time in front of a television set or a computer screen.

For those whose good fortune is to be exposed to the ''Digimon'' movie solely by reading this review, the two tales it tells revolve around some supposedly terrestrial children known as the DigiDestined and the Digimon, their companions from the fantastic Digiworld.

In the first half of the movie, which sketches this background and introduces various characters, the children team up with some good Digimon to thwart an evil Digimon that invades the Internet, thus threatening, as one little boy puts it, to ''wipe out all technology as we know it.''

In the second adventure, which seems to have been tacked on, the scene shifts to the United States, where the DigiDestined from various points of the compass gather to address the problem of a Digimon afflicted with a virus that has turned it into a hulking menace.

In both chapters, intermittent battles erupt among fantasy creatures with beaks, wings, scales, talons, foul tempers, and occasional beauty and benevolence, in which the earth shudders, lights flash, fireballs blaze and explosions resound to a driving rock music accompaniment. The soundtrack is said to be available now.

The word balderdash seems to have slipped into disuse, but ''Digimon: The Movie'' might help to resurrect it. LAWRENCE VAN GELDER