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Pokemon: The First Movie Movie Review

Pokemon: The First Movie is a 1998 anime fantasy adventure film directed by Kunihiko Yuyama. It’s a very messy, but solid and fun flick.

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“So, this is my power…

but what is my purpose?“

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After a scientific experiment leads to the creation of a clone of Mewtwo, he sets out to destroy the world. Ash and his friends then decide to thwart Mewtwo’s evil plans. This was the very first Pokemon movie and it was a big hit with fans, but it received mediocre reviews and it continues to be badly evaluated today. I personally find it to be perfectly solid, though obviously deeply flawed.

My major issue with this movie is its ugly visuals. The animation here is so atrociously cheap and dated that it seemed as if it came out in the early eighties and certainly not the late nineties. Making a film out of a television series should at least mean that the technical aspects would be improved upon, but here that sadly wasn’t the case. The character designs are fine and the backgrounds are interesting, but again all of it looked rough and unpolished.

I did like the score quite a bit and that they included the iconic opening theme in the movie itself, but most of its fun pop tunes were overly cheesy in lyrics and too contemporary for the time. Again, I liked them and I even sang along with a couple of them, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize their cheesiness. The directing, editing, pacing and the overall structure are all weak. The movie is way too short and still felt overly drawn out in its final battle scenes.

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Mewtwo made for a terrific villain. They went so hard in the opening section by making him feel super menacing and cool. The backstory behind his creation was interesting and all the science in this movie was definitely fun, though obviously overwhelming. The cloning in particular wasn’t all too well explored. My main problem with this storyline is that the villain was right all along. The Pokemon franchise is all about how humans and their pocket monsters are friends, but it’s hard to argue against them actually being their slaves when they would use Pokemon to fight for them all the time. This inconsistency certainly muted the impact of its message for kids.

Mewtwo was still a fantastic antagonist and I loved his voice, his look and his story. But the other characters were seriously sidelined due to the extensive emphasis on this one Pokemon. For instance, Team Rocket got almost nothing to do in this movie save for delivering a few funny puns here and there. Misty was uninteresting here and Brock fared almost the same. Thankfully, we got a lot of emphasis on Ash and Pikachu, the latter being absolutely adorable throughout. That one scene where Ash almost died and Pikachu tried to revive him was super sweet and genuinely touching.

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The opening was a great hook for the story, but unfortunately the third act ruined any goodwill that the first half gained due to bad action scenes. The fights were uninteresting and that one sequence where the Pokemon fought with their clones was needlessly prolonged and dumb. Many plot holes were present here and the movie is definitely intended for children and fans of the franchise only and nobody else.