The "Pokémon" Franchise

[StevePulaski]

Pokémon: The First Movie (1998)
Directed by: Kunihiko Yuyama

Rating: ★½

Growing up in the late nineties, early 2000's, the popularity of trading cards had surpassed the typical baseball cards and went on to those belonging to a strategy/duel game such as Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh!. The international phenomenon only intrigued me because I was astounded as to how many different cards there were from both separate games. I remember the grocery store aisles having large, forty-plus card collector packs inside glass display cases, and kids all over challenging their friends and classmates to "duels" of all different kinds. I remember buying dozens of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards just so I could sit in my room, stare at them, and pretend like I knew what I was talking myself through.

Pokémon became the mega-hit of all these trading card games, however. It was a global entity that found a way to stretch itself across the world all the way from Japan thanks to its ubiquitous and neverending line of characters, its in-your-face design and marketing scheme, and its successful Television show on Cartoon Network buoyed by its stuffed animals, action figures, and Game Boy games all the more. What was the object of this game? I still have never head a clear, direct answer aside from the franchise's slogan, "Gotta catch em all," further cementing the idea that we, as kids, were being sold something we had no idea what purpose it had and we were just repeating corporate-created phrases and spending our hard-earned allowance on toys, games, cards, and other needless things whose significance we couldn't coherently explain. The franchise's slogan is such a tease as well, telling us how we need to "catch" all of these obscure animated characters but not as quickly as sleep-deprived artists can paint more of them and Chinese toymakers can produce them.

Cynicism aside, indulging in Pokémon: The First Movie was the most time I've ever spent one-on-one with these characters, and with three other films in the immediate film franchise, it likely won't be my last. This review will likely be brief, since there is simply not much to say with these characters, their motivations, or their struggles. The franchise's leap to the big screen is a mediocre endeavor, lasting only seventy minutes and existing simply as a marketing campaign for the Pokémon card game, which was already global enough before the release of this film.

Regardless, Pokémon fans everyone desperately tried to justify its existence as a theatrical film, even though the picture takes the same risks and does the same exact thing it would likely do as an hour-long special on Cartoon Network. The story opens with a group of scientists that have found a way to genetically clone a renowned Pokémon by the name of Mew. His offspring is now called Mewtwo, who then chooses to clone other Pokémen for his own power. This results in an even more overcrowded sector of Pokémon, leaving Ash Ketcham and his pals Misty and Brock to travel to Mewtwo's island where battles between the real Pokémen along with their clone-counterparts can take place.

For as big as Pokémon is as a franchise, it sure makes little to no sense. The morals and themes of the entire franchise teach us the fundamental ideas of love, togetherness, acceptance, and kindness, and yet all these characters seem to do is fight, yell, and use flashing lights as their weaponry. This is one of those films where so much happens but so little of it is interesting to anyone outside of the franchise's core age demographic, which is as young as eight and as old as thirty-eight, I presume. You'd think the longer you'd play and support such a program that implores you "catch" all of their characters, and the more you'd witness how many different games and characters the franchise releases, you'd wake up one day and realize your dream is like trying to win a one-hundred mile race on a treadmill that increases how much longer you have to run by two miles after you've just completed one mile.

The animation is often bright, some of the characters are kind of cute, and on rare occasions, the film manages to have some interesting elements thanks to its diverse creatures. Yet, Pokémon: The First Movie finds itself to be nothing more than an array of publicity and indescribable animated action sequences thrown together in a film. It's chaotic and often depressingly cold.

Directed by: Kunihiko Yuyama.