Pikachu in Pictures Chapter 21: All This, and the Best Pokémon Movie Ever Made

…Oh, right. There’s this project. Well, I shouldn’t only play Zelda! Let’s dish about some good episodes, at least one bad one, and a film that straight shook me to my core.

Episodes reviewed:

2042: “Alola, Kanto!” (September 14, 2017). Professor Kukui’s got a new trip for the class: the Kanto region—and Misty and Brock are their guides! As Ash reminisces with the two of them, the three introduce his classmates to the panoply of Pokémon living at Professor Oak’s lab.
2110: “Rescuing the Unwilling!” (December 7, 2017). The class has gone into the extra-dimensional plane of Ultra Space to rescue Lusamine, Lillie and Gladion’s mother who has merged with one of its Ultra Beast denizens. Ash chases her down on the sun Pokémon Solgaleo, while each of his classmates holds off one of Lusamine’s souped-up Pokémon.
2112: “The Professors’ New Adventure!” (December 21, 2017). In the “one thousandth episode” spectacular, Professor Kukui proposes to his colleague Professor Burnet. They tell Ash in private, Ash immediately tells the class, and they conspire to host a surprise wedding.
2126: “The Young Flame Strikes Back!” (April 19, 2018). Kiawe’s family farm is threatened by a greedy land developer. While his folks are harassed by the developer’s goons and his classmates help out around the farm, Kiawe trains with his unruly Marowak after losing to the man.
2135: “Showering the World with Love!” (June 14, 2018). The latest class trip is the Hokulani Observatory, where Sophocles’ cousin Molayne studies the Minior who fall from space as comets. The kids have fun with the new visitors, but Sophocles tries to remember a detail he blocked out as a child: all Minior, including these, are fated to die once they hit the ground and lose their protective shells.

Once again, Alola shows a willingness—nay, an excitement—to step outside the creative fences the Pokémon anime had spent two decades setting up for itself. Season 21, goofily titled “Ultra Adventures” (after a plotline we didn’t see where the class become Sentai heroes), continues Season 20’s direction by finding new horizons. There are episodes about land theft, mass deaths, and marriage. I don’t think it works as well as last week did, primarily because the animation’s a bit weaker, but there isn’t a creative backslide here.

Image: Bulbapedia. The Minior episode makes great use of Ash’s Poipole, a child Pokémon from another dimension who struggles to understand the sudden death of its friend.

The two last ones of the week were the best here. “The Young Flame Strikes Back” explores, for one of the first times in the franchise’s history, the kind of real world abuse that you’d never see in the world of Pokémon. It’s an exciting and ambitious swing for this franchise, and it holds up as both a paean to the working man and an episode where Kiawe becomes a better Trainer. But “Showering the World with Love” is no less wild, given that it ends with Ash watching an entire colony of Minior pass on into a shower of colorful space dust. Both of these are stories the franchise has never been interested in telling. They’re also told well, putting the main characters front and center and making them stronger. Kiawe, Lillie, Sophocles, and Kukui are good friends for Ash, and a lot of what makes them strong is that they have homes we spend time with and can see threatened or imperiled.

It’s not all new, though, and this week had a notable number of callbacks to the original era of the show. Admittedly, all of them were in “Alola, Kanto,” which threw in Misty, Brock, the recurring Jigglypuff, the classic Team Rocket theme, and even a cameo by Mew (who had, amazingly, never appeared within the show in the flesh before). Ash sees Bulbasaur, gets smothered by Muk, and watches one of Brock’s always-awful flirtations go awry. It’s a barrage of nostalgia, one that works alright when Misty and Brock had both been away for many years. Plus, Team Rocket’s machine has the classic “R” that looks like the Rutgers logo, so that’s good too.

I imagine even more than normal, the Pokémon writers were feeling the age of the show and wanted to harken back to when everything was simpler. Advertising the Red & Blue era of the franchise is pretty evergreen, but their Let’s Go remakes were well over a year away, so other than having a space to show off all of the Alolan forms there wasn’t really much in the way of vertical integration here. This is what happens when you go on for this long; you inherently have to start looking inward. That’s also what you get once you hit one thousand episodes—at least by The Pokémon Company International’s count. Having a wedding episode between Kukui and Burnet is pretty atypical for any side of this franchise, though it fits Sun & Moon’s greater focus on sitcom antics, relationships, and emotional beats. It’s a fun story, and once again one that couldn’t exist without this setting and direction.

Image: The Pokémon Company. Alola, soft redesigns of Misty and Brock! Ya know, they never needed to redesign Max (since, of course, they never brought him back. Take that, Max!).

I’m disappointed to say, though, that I did have less fun than last time, and not because I’m still immersed in Tears of the Kingdom. The worst of it is “Rescuing the Unwilling,” which like a lot of middle parts to a multi-episode story struggles to make a real space for itself. The backstory with Lillie and her mother’s Clefable is good, but so much of the episode consists of boring-looking battles that are stopped dead so Rotom can explain each new opponent. It’s a shame I was burned by something that had been recommended on several “best of” lists for Sun & Moon, though the animation was a bit weaker across the board, too. And while I liked the romance in “The Professor’s New Adventure,” it was a bit weird seeing a plot about Ash planning a wedding without the bride or groom’s knowledge. Admittedly, it is hard to match some of the highs from last time, but my picks this week weren’t quite as strong. And that’s okay.

Movie reviewed: Pokémon the Movie: The Power of Us (July 13, 2018)

All eyes are on windy Fula City, whose great fans are powered by its patron Lugia and whose mountains are powered by a curse. Over the course of its Wind Festival six strangers cross paths: a former track star trying to catch an Eevee for her brother, a braggadocious uncle lying about his Training prowess, an elderly woman with a hatred of Pokémon, a shy nebbish of a scientist, the chipper daughter of the mayor, and Ash Ketchum. Together they find themselves confronted by a Team Rocket theft, Pokémon poachers, disasters of the natural and unnatural sort, and the dark truth behind the legend of Fula City’s violent attacker Zeraora.

Well, the Entei movie had a good run. Yes, the twenty-first movie of this incredibly mercenary series is actually, shockingly, the best entry in the cinematic Pokémon canon by my estimation. From its series-strongest writing and localization to its jazz band remix of the classic “Route 1” theme, The Power of Us has a level of craftsmanship that I’ve barely ever seen from this franchise and couldn’t have imagined from the anime. But the plot itself goes so much further. It becomes something greater, something more thoughtful and cinematic.

Image: IMDb. The art style manages to also find a niche that’s not unlike Sun & Moon but also unique. And the animation in general is lovely.

Structurally, the movie feels somewhat of a piece with Spell of the Unown’s Johto era. The movie features Lugia, like the pre-Johto The Power of One (the dub’s title even riffs on that). Fula City is primarily home to Generation II Pokémon, and it also evokes the settings from Voice of the Unown and Pokémon Heroes. But it also feels like a culmination of everything thus far. It’s a disaster movie, but better executed than the still pretty fun Destiny Deoxys. It has the same multi-day festival structure as Jirachi Wish Maker. Marquee Legendary Zeraora has shades of Pokémon from Volcanion to Lucario with its distrust of humans, and the way the movie pulls the thread on its history is reminiscent of some of these plots. There’s no reason this has to be the Ash from I Choose You beyond the potential weirdness of him not being at the school, but it’s at least continuing the reboot’s promise. And it does seem to be an extension of the modern eras of the anime; there’s a refreshing lack of classic Pokémon battling and a much better handle on the ensemble.

That ensemble is the film’s greatest strength. Ash is still the nominal protagonist, and he’s important as the heart and the impetus for a lot of the character growth, but he is very much just one castmate. And he’s got fun partners this time. Everyone is kind of that disaster movie stereotype who nurses a big secret and ends up rising to the occasion, but they all have a little bit more. And when they don’t, they can lean on charm and personality. Risa’s the “injured athlete who’s scared and forced to leap back in,” and “the person who doesn’t want to be here from the start,” but her interactions with Ash and the Eevee she catches are fun. The wonderfully caustic Harriet manages to be more than just a cantankerous old person. Callahan, the big-hearted, compulsively lying brute of an uncle, has to learn honesty from a Sudowoodo he saves on accident and he’s the standout for it. Other Pokémon films have had good characters and even good casts, but this is the first and maybe only one with an actually great cast. And the movie knows it, keeping Ash out of the spotlight for a while. Sure, he gets to fight Zeraora, but everyone’s contributions have no less big of an impact. That’s why it’s called “Everybody’s Story” in Japan. It’s about the wrong place, the wrong time, and bystanders who have to be the right people.

That and several other details—only putting the narrator’s “welcome to the world of Pokémon” speech at the end, not doing a montage set to an opening’s worse remix—make it fairly clear the writers knew they had something big. They weren’t wrong; after its token Stateside theatrical run this became the best reviewed Pokémon movie on Rotten Tomatoes (not that its “71%” meter is that great, or that it had a lot of competition). I knew the reputation of this thing going in, and it’s earned. The Power of Us is a tremendous accomplishment. I don’t know if the franchise could do this kind of storytelling consistently, but it is a bit of a shame that we only got two animated features afterwards.

Image: IMDb. Fula City’s also a very compelling setting, even if it’s not as “flashy” as some of the older ones.

Over the course of “Pikachu in Pictures,” I’ve had a running gag about how “this almost feels like a real show!” It’s demeaning, pretentious, and certainly unfair to the people who work on these things. It’s hard for Pokémon the Series to not be the thing it is, especially compared to other television programs. But the joke also feels needless here when you have a well told story, many distinct characters, a great art style, and a higher caliber of writing than I’m used to from this property. To an extent, it even makes me wonder if something like this could’ve been made back when I was watching Season 1 for the first time. Did the anime have to grow and age to create The Power of Us? Was it the result of Sun & Moon, or rebooting the movies? And while the TV show always needed to slowly change, could the movies have grown faster? I can’t help but wonder about that, but for now, I’d like not to. Instead, I just want to celebrate one of the sharpest, most thoughtful products of the Pokémon franchise. It deserves that, at least.

Conclusion: It’s honestly a bit surprising to be this late in the Pokémon game and be confronted with a relatively weak batch of episodes and a strong movie. By this point, it felt like stuff had pretty well evened out the other way, even if I’m pretty sure my own missives could shoot that theory dead anyway. Either way, The Power of Us is one of a few Pokémon movies I’d be willing to happily watch on my own, and it would’ve made almost any five episodes look lacking by comparison.

And it wasn’t like Season 21 was bad; I just picked one bad episode and got a couple that weren’t as interesting. The Kiawe and Minior episodes were great, and they continued this trend of Sun & Moon going out of its way to tell new stories. I alluded to this some other time, but when I was preparing this project and learned that the show actually did an episode about a sleazy landlord who tried to force a family off their home, I was shocked. I’m still shocked. The show does close the story neatly with the bad guy being taken away, but it still shows a badness to the world that exists outside of Pokémon. And doing a story about Kukui wanting to introduce his students to aspects of Pokémon death, where Sophocles has repressed memories of losing his friend, is impressive as well. In a way, these are reminiscent of the darker PokéDex entries and world building from the games, things that touched fans’ imaginations but have often been softened in adaptations.

Image: The Pokémon Company. Kukui’s marriage proposal is pretty great, too.

And more importantly, I feel no less confident declaring the Sun & Moon experiment a success. It’s notable to me that the worst Alola episode in both weeks was the middle episode of a multi-part arc, one whose focus on action is more reminiscent of what the show used to be. Maybe those are still difficult to do. But things are better, and closer to the kind of art I think it’s fair to expect from a television show this successful and established. If a few bum episodes is what it takes to be this daring at its best, that’s a fair price.

Errant thoughts:

The Power of Us does have one painful flaw in that it does feature a performance by Vic Mignogna. It’s only for three bit parts—the sex pest has far less dialogue than Sudowoodo—and I think it’s at least his last work with Pokémon, but still. Eesh.
Less icky, like I said this leans hard on the Johto Pokémon, in a way I find charming (there wasn’t any committed push for them anywhere else in the franchise; I assume it was just done so reboot Ash’s second movie had second Generation Pokémon). Barely any come from after that era, and Zeraora’s the only one with plot relevance. One of the ones that get a cameo is my Number Two ‘Mon, Weavile, and that’s yet another small piece of evidence for my theory that it’s a low key mascot of Gen IV. I mean, it’s been in every regional Poké Dex since Black 2 & White 2.
Bulbapedia claims that “The Professor’s New Adventure” is actually the 994^th episode, including the episodes 4Kids and TPCI didn’t localize. Then again, they also claim the remix of Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” isn’t in the dub when it categorically is. Anyway, this was just a weird marketing gimmick, but I do think choosing this is a sign of how important Sun & Moon’s direction really was. This company wanted to advertise a wedding episode, not the one where Ash caught a Buzzwole for a hot minute.
Speaking of other Bulbapedia notes, one thing the site’s editors dutifully study is the gaps between Pokémon’s appearances in episodes and movies, which lead to some fascinating details. Typhlosion’s background role in the movie was its first animated appearance in fourteen years (which is a shame seeing as it’s my favorite Gen II and Gen XIII starter). “Alola, Kanto” went just as hard; alongside Misty and the recurring Jigglypuff’s first appearances since the mid-2000s, it marks the first time several Pokémon had been seen in hundreds of episodes.
Hey, another fun weird dub edit! In the Kanto episode, the adults drink cartoon neon green beverages instead of what’s meant to be beer.
Lillie narrates the preview for “Rescuing the Unwilling” instead of the omniscient narrator. I think it speaks to the intimacy of the show; it’s her story, and she has more invested than the “and the journey continues!” guy.
The dub soundtrack is far more noticeably bad this time around. Especially in the Lusamine episode, where it needs to have a more alien and actually dramatic score but instead uses the lighter music from the other episodes.
- On a similar note, the theme for Season 21 is pretty bad. It’s weirdly dark, has absurd lyrics (it presents “studying” as no less emotionally important than “sharing” and “caring”), and doesn’t fit any lighthearted episode for this sitcom. It’s not as melodically bad or lifeless as many dub openings, but it’s the most ill-fitting of all.
There was no episode I’d switch it with, but I’m very sad the episode order led me to miss “Why Not Give Me a Z-Ring Sometime,” the episode that debuted the Ula’Ula Island Kahuna / grumpy ex-cop Nanu. Nanu’s a personal favorite of mine among the Sun & Moon characters, and he’s the very first Dark-type specialist to appear in the anime.
As has become standard, there’s a ton of minor continuity references in seemingly every episode. Either a character will be thinking of someone else or they’ll allude to an event from the past. This is the kind of… ugh, fine. This is the kind of continuity that normal entertainment has, where episodes aren’t inherently graded on how relevant they are.

Next movie: Pokémon: Mewtwo Strikes Back—Evolution

Next episodes:

2209: “Parallel Friendships!”
2216: “Memories in the Mist”
2245: “The Wisdom Not to Run!”
2252: “From Z to Shining Z!”
2254: “Thank You, Alola! The Journey Continues!”

Other movies watched:

Friday the 13^th Part VII: The New Blood
John Wick: Chapter 4. Current John Wick ranking: 2, 1, 3, 4. Also, I wish we could’ve seen John fight Dalton from Road House.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture

Other television episodes watched: