Pokemon Day 2019 gave fans of the long running franchise plenty to get excited about. A second trailer for the upcoming Detective Pikachu movie was released online, and as of this writing has been viewed 23 million times. Pokemon has done an incredible job marketing this movie. There seems to be something to enjoy in this film whether you've grown up with Pokemon or haven't given it a single thought before in your entire life. Basically, it looks like we'll be getting a new age Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but with Pokemon in it, when this movie premieres on May 10. I can easily see Detective Pikachu being the dark horse of summer 2019 and raking in some serious money if it gets a warm reception from critics and general audiences.
Which brings me to the main topic of discussion for today. Pokemon has also released a Japanese language trailer for its 22nd main series movie titled Mewtwo Strikes Back Evolution. If you've followed the Pokemon franchise since the beginning, the title of this film should give you an idea of what it's about. Namely, it's a retelling of the events of the first ever Pokemon movie, Mewtwo Strikes Back, released way back in 1999.
In that movie, Mewtwo is a Pokemon created by scientists to be the most powerful Pokemon in the world. It escapes from human control, and harbors a deep hatred of humans and regular Pokemon. Mewtwo enacts a plan to gather some of the best Pokemon trainers around, capture their Pokemon, and replace the Pokemon with cloned versions more powerful than the originals. Mewtwo will then use its clone army to destroy humanity and all Pokemon loyal to humans. It was a halfway decent movie in its day, well suited for kids who always wanted to see Pokemon battles on the big screen. I personally think the subsequent two movies eclipsed this film both in terms of spectacle and storytelling, but Mewtwo Strikes Back was an okay first effort and really cemented Pokemon as a pop culture icon of the late 1990s.
Now, I'm about as big a Pokemon fan as there can possibly be, but there is nothing about this new movie that excites me at all. As near as I can tell from the trailer, it's a scene for scene remake of the original movie. We see the ancient ruins where Mew's DNA is found to create Mewtwo. The layout of Mewtwo's lair also looks the same. All the characters from the first movie seem to be there, too.
Speaking of the characters, the designs of the humans are positively awful. They look like the figures used in Robot Chicken's Pokemon parodies. The rest of the film's design, while not bad on its own, looks embarrassingly cheap compared to other theatrically released computer animated films. One of the draws of the original movie was that the animators were able to use their higher budget to create visuals they couldn't do in the regular anime. When you saw that movie in theaters, you truly got a higher level experience. I'm curious to see how Pokemon plans to distribute this new film in the US. I think it would work fine as a direct to television special, but may lead to a lot of buyer's remorse if people need to pay for a full price movie ticket to see it.
If Pokemon wants people to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the first Pokemon movie so badly, they should just let people watch the first Pokemon movie. In fact, considering that thousands if not millions of children have grown up since Mewtwo Strikes Back graced the big screen, being able to watch it again at cinemas alongside kids of their own could be a real treat.
Pokemon Day 2019 thus presents a strange conundrum. All sources indicate that Detective Pikachu can provide the same nitro fueled adrenaline rush to the franchise that Pokemon Go did in 2016. However, Mewtwo Strikes Back Evolution's poor quality and lack of original storytelling could jeopardize Pokemon's newfound momentum. Mewtwo boasted in the first movie that his clones were superior to the originals in every way. Unfortunately, while this new movie seems to be cloned straight from the original, too, everything about it looks substantially worse.
