POCKET MONSTERS: CELEBI TOKI WO KOETA DEAI

DESCRIPTION

CAST

SPECIAL AdventurePikachu no Dokidoki Kakurenbo
ANIME ActionPocket Monsters
MANGA ActionGekijouban Pocket Monsters: Celebi Toki wo Koeta Deai

REVIEWS

• 

  TheRealKyuubey

  60/100
  I was pleasantly surprised by this one.

  We’re all familiar with the timeline of the Pokemon world. It’s the modern day, and we’ve spent decades following ten year old Ash Ketchum on his journey to fill out his pokedex and become a pokemon master! However, forty years ago, back when Ash was probably still ten, there was another young boy named Sammy, who travelled the world drawing sketches of the pokemon he encountered. One day, as he was about to explore the forested region hidden behind a giant wooden barrier, he received an ominous warning: If you hear the cry of the forest’s guardian, stand very still, or she’ll take you with her into a different time! Sam initially planned to follow this rule, but when he saw the voice of the forest being assaulted by a poacher, he had to step in... Only to get dragged into the future. Now, with the help of his new friend Ash, can Sam solve the mystery of how to protect both the forest, as well as how to return home to his own time?

  For the most part, Pokemon 4Ever looks like your standard entry in the Pokemon series, albeit with maybe a slightly higher budget. There are moments that showcase a bunch of different cost cutting techniques, but there are also a lot of moments where the animation is fast, smooth and kinetic. So basically, it looks like the series on a pretty good day, at almost it’s best. There are only really a few interesting things I can say about the visuals of this specific feature. One, the CG looks like ass, and there’s way too much of it for how bad it looks. Guys, you didn’t need to render two tree branches breaking in 3D. Two, in spite of this the environment looks beautiful, which is a big plus for a movie whose biggest theme is nature related. Almost all of this film takes place in a forest, which is highly detailed and looks consistently alive. Finally, weirdly enough, 4Kids commissioned the Japanese creators to animate three new scenes for them, all of which we’ll discuss later in the review.

  Much like with the visuals, there isn’t a lot I can say about the dub, because come on, it’s the Pokemon dub. Everyone and their grandmother is familiar with this dub, especially in the period BEFORE everybody started getting recast, which this movie definitely was, but I’ll still put in the effort to find some things to comment on. Ash’s new friend Sam is played by Tara Jayne, another legendary 90’s and 2000’s voice actor, who had played numerous smaller characters throughout the series, most notably Richie from the Indigo Plateau and Ash’s Bulbasaur, so she already had a strong chemistry with Veronica Taylor prior to filming this movie. There are two cast members who have sadly passed away in the over 20 years since this movie came out; The first was Maddie Blaustein, who famously voiced the character Meowth, but was also unrecognizable as the old poacher from the beginning of this movie, because that’s just how insanely talented she was.

  The second actor to pass away was Rachel Lillis, who sadly died of breast cancer earlier this year, and she’s well known for voicing Misty and Team Rocket’s Jessie, and while Jigglypuff does have a quick cameo, she doesn’t have any lines. Misty sadly doesn’t have anything to do in this movie, like she doesn’t call out a single pokemon or anything, but Jessie has her share of stand-out moments, at least from a comic relief stand-point. Also, while we’re on the subject of Team Rocket, I recently learned the origin of James’ foppish cadence, and it actually has a small similarity to the origin of Pikachu’s name for Ash, Pikapi. Like Ash, James’ original Japanese name(Kojiro) had three syllables, so it was decided early on that in the traditional Team Rocket intro, they would have Eric Stuart drag his name out in an exaggerated, seductive way to cover all three syllables. Kojiro became “Ja-aa-ames.” I just thought that would be a cool fact to throw in. Anyway, it’s not a standout dub for any particular reason, but whichever version of the Pokemon anime you prefer, that’s the version I’d recommend going with.

  One quick note on the music, most of the soundtrack is the same as the Japanese version, with the exception of a really cringey song they added at the end, that goes “Celebi-ration” or some other stupid shit.

  So yeah, this is the fourth pokemon movie. If anybody’s wondering, I didn’t have any specific reason to skip the third one, I just kinda wanted to cover this one now because it’s my 251’st review, and Celebi is Pokemon number 251. The title, 4Ever, was eerily prophetic, as this movie came out at a time when the franchise wasn’t necessarily guaranteed to last until the end of time, which we now are pretty comfortable that it will. At this point, from a modern day perspective, the curious immortality of the series has become one of it’s most fascinating, and most annoying, aspects. Most shows that run for as long as this one has will inevitably find themselves in a pretty tricky situation. A lot of the people who grew up with the show are no longer children, and while there’s always going to be a comfort in the nostalgia of the past, they also want to see the show that grew up alongside of them, you know, actually grow up, but it’s hard to do that without alienating the new child audiences that need the same simple entertainment their parents had, and who don’t give two shits about the evolution or continuity of the material.

  Ultimately, the Pokemon franchise would seemingly follow an interesting strategy for this: While the games would grow up, adopting more complex mechanics and exploring more mature social issues, the anime would cater more to children, sort of evolving itself into an episodic series wearing the clever disguise of a continuous series, following Ash’s journey as he goes through every new region that the games introduced, never really developing outside of catching new pokemon and visiting new locations in order to better advertise the most recently added content in a never ending cycle of purgatory. Through it all, Ash never ages, just like how Bart and Lisa Simpson never age, despite celebrating the same holidays over and over again. Much like The Simpsons, Pokemon is stuck in a stasis where doing the same shit on repeat without taking any risks is simply the safe and financially secure option. I loved Orange Islands, for example, but they’re never going to try anything THAT far out of the box again.

  I was a teenager in the nineties, so I got into the series when it was just hitting the states, and I can say from personal experience that it’s very easy to approach it with a sense of tunnel vision towards its failure to live up to your expectations as a grown fan. Hell, the reason it took me so long to watch this movie(Aside from Miramax taking over distribution rights from Warner Bros and generally botching the theaterical run) was because it came out when I was entering an extremely cynical period of my life, and I just hated how the title of the movie was a really lazy pun on the number 4. Shrek also did the fucking 4Ever joke, but with an After at the end. Now that I’m a lot older, though, I’ve made efforts to keep a wider audience in mind while reviewing anime that might not have been for me, so I’m going to try to approach this film with more of an open mind than I did for the previous entries. I’ve already gone back and changed my score for the second movie, my personal favorite, so I’m already on this path and there’s nothing left to lose, so how well does Pokemon 4Ever hold up?

  And I mean aside from the dirty booty CG animation.

  Well first off, it starts out pretty well. I appreciate that this movie opens with a pretty generous explanation of what Pokemon actually is, for any tots whose parents bought them this movie as a piece of shovelware. So, if this happens to be a kid’s introduction to Pokemon, it’s not a bad one. Throughout the film, but especially in the opening narration, we’re shown a very impressive range of wild pokemon just living their lives, from the most basic first route babies to a fucking Porygon, who I can’t believe they were legally allowed to add after that whole seizure incident got it blacklisted from any future anime appearances. I also really like the fact that the poacher is going after Celebi with a Scyther and a Houndoom, since bug/flying and dark/fire are two deadly combinations for a grass/psychic Celebi, and you don't see that kind of attention paid to type advantages in the series very often. The girl guarding the forest is basically just an exposition mouthpiece, but seeing Sam’s interactions with Celebi as they ultimately rescue each other is fairly exciting.

  From there we jump to the future, where a lot seems to be happening at once. We switch to a new villain, as we see the now much older poacher from the opening accosted in his cabin full of surprisingly uncensored beer bottles, by a really bland and generic Team Rocket villain who has a stupid looking mask and a dumb name no matter what language you speak... Vicious in Japanese, and “The Iron Masked Marauder” in English. He wants to know where the poacher fought Celebi forty years ago, which means he either knows how long Celebi’s time jump was, or he’s just benefitting from an extremely lucky coincidence. He also has a special pokeball that turns pokemon evil, which is stupid, because any pokemon you catch is automatically loyal and willing to do your bidding, meaning if you’re evil, the Pokemon will automatically be evil as well. It also automatically raises a Pokemon’s abilities and stats to their maximum, sure, why not, it sounds like a more reliable cheat-training method than glitch-farming rare candies.

  In another story thread, Ash struggles to beat a middle-stage water pokemon with his highly experienced electric Pikachu(see?), but that’s not the movie’s fault, the series is like that too. They spot Suicune on a boat trip, and tell Professor Oak about it through a video call, which interestingly uses a handful of original animation shots, commissioned by 4Kids, to drop a few clues for what was supposed to be a really subtle plot twist later on in the film. I’m not going to criticize them for assuming their audience would be too stupid to figure out the twist on their own, for reasons we’ll get to later, but it would have been a lot more efficient to just alter the dub a little... But then they wouldn’t have been able to edit out the cameos of Tracey and Muk? Also Ash has in fact seen Suicune before, he should not have had to ask Oak about it.

  Not long after this, Ash and his friends enter the forest and meet Sam, and in my opinion, this is where the film hits its stride. The interactions between Ash, Sam and Celebi are adorable, fun and full of whimsy, and while you wouldn’t be incorrect to call it filler, the filler is easily the highlight of the movie. There is some action going on, which is fine, I particularly liked seeing Bayleef in battle after all this time, but to see a sequence of Ash and Sam swimming with Celebi transitioning to a flying scene faster than you can say Pines of Rome is enchanting as hell. Seeing them bond in a field of freshly evolved Butterfree is heartwarming, and the way the other wild pokemon are used throughout the story, it really goes a long way in selling the idea that Celebi is an important part of this ecosystem, and its inhabitants will do whatever it takes to save and protect her. There’s a long portion of this movie that I could see some viewers calling boring fluff, but I’d be equally willing to believe there are a lot of people out there who vibe with that fluff, myself included.

  On the other hand, you have the Team Rocket side of things, and it’s not all bad... There’s another scene around the middle of the movie that 4Kids commissioned, and it’s nothing but a couple of minutes of Jessie, James and Meowth being clown shoes. You could look at this sequence and call it pointless, or a blatant waste of money, and you wouldn’t be wrong, but personally, I think it actually offers a necessary tweak to the pacing, breaking up all of the whimsical fluff just enough to keep it from becoming tedious, but that’s just my take. Also, I don’t want to give away any too specific spoilers, but there are SOME cool moments that result from Mr. Marauder encountering our heroes, even if everything about him and his plans can only be described as generic, uninspired and stupid. As far as one-shot Team Rocket villains go, he’s no Domino. Damn it do I miss Domino. The movie wraps up, there’s one more commissioned scene right at the end that tries to make the twist more obvious, but come on, it was already spoiled two years prior in the second movie.

  So how is the fourth pokemon movie? Well, despite the fact that I came in with rock bottom expectations, I liked it. Like a lot. Not every pokemon movie has to have some huge, apocalyptic threat going on. Out of the Pokemon movies that I’ve seen, this one is probably the smallest in scale, and the lightest in terms of stakes, but it’s also kind of adorable, and it knows how to tell a story that relies primarily on emotion without resorting to forced conflict or overblown melancholy. It’s far from perfect, but I can’t really see any problems with it that aren’t generally common to the rest of the franchise. Sure, Sam pulls out a wind-up steampunk pokeball that’s never explained and conflicts with a lot of what we know about Pokemon lore, but guess what? The bad guy in the second movie owned a fucking Pokemon trading card. Explain THAT shit.

  I haven’t seen a ton of Pokemon movies, but I think it’s fair to call this my second favorite. It’s charming, and I was both entertained and engaged enough that I had an easy time turning my brain off through the worst of its stupid bullshit, which let’s be real, every Pokemon project has SOME stupid bullshit. The twist at the end is genuinely really cool, and reframes a lot of what you've seen with the franchise up to that point, even if it's pretty obvious to anybody who's seen the second movie. I can’t guarantee you’ll have the same experience, in fact most of you would probably just find it boring and stupid, but I really like it. It’s a seventy minute movie that moves pretty quickly, so what do you have to lose?

  I give Pokemon 4Ever a 6/10

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