It’s been over 20 years since 10-year-old Ash Ketchum first met Pikachu and embarked on a journey to become the very best Pokemon Master that ever was.
The best friends have travelled across various lands, competed in countless battles and are still hitting new milestones.
Ash and Pikachu revisit their roots and tackle a few new firsts in their latest animated feature, Pokemon: Mewtwo Strikes Back – Evolution, out now on Netflix.
The film is a 3DCG (3D computer graphics) remake of the first film of the franchise – Pokemon: The First Movie: Mewtwo Strikes Back – making it both the first-ever remake and the first fully 3DCG instalment in the long-running movie franchise.
It’s also the first Pokemon movie to be released globally (excluding Japan and Korea) as a Netflix Original, after the streamer acquired the license from the Pokemon Company International. And the release date is no accident: February 27 was Pokemon Day, which commemorates the anniversary of the original game’s release in Japan.
Although the plot and story beats are nearly identical, Mewtwo Strikes Back is not quite a shot-for-shot remake of Pokemon: The First Movie. The new film runs slightly longer – fans will notice it includes some tweaks that help clarify certain moments and others that help update jokes.
Additionally, while Mewtwo Strikes Back is another story that spotlights a Pikachu and the man-made Pokemon Mewtwo, the film has no relation to the live-action/CGI hybrid Detective Pikachu released last year by Warner Bros. The two movies occupy different planes in the Pokemon multiverse, and the computer-animated Pokemon in each could not look more different.
Directed by Kunihiko Yuyama and Motonori Sakakibara, Mewtwo Strikes Back is actually the 22nd instalment in Japan’s animated Pokemon movie series, and it hit the big screens there last July. At the time, Yuyama told the Japanese press that the possibility of making a fully 3DCG Pokemon movie was an idea that had long been floated around. And while the timing of Mewtwo Strikes Back had more to do with all the technical elements falling into place than anything else, he added that there was a sense of inevitability to the franchise’s first 3DCG movie revisiting the very first movie in the series.
For Yuyama, Mewtwo Strikes Back marks a return to the director’s seat. In addition to overseeing the first six series of the Japanese Pokemon cartoon (which internationally has been broken up to span 22 seasons), Yuyama has directed the first 20 films. (He served as the animation supervisor on the 21st, Pokemon the Movie: The Power of Us, directed by Tetsuo Yajima.)
The massive multimedia franchise’s roots are in two role-playing video games released in Japan on February 27, 1996: Pokemon Red and Pokemon Green. By the time the titles hit the US as Pokemon Red and Blue in 1998, the Pokemon craze was well underway across the Pacific: the TV series had launched, a movie had been released, and there were sequel games on the way.
The animated series, which also made it to the US in 1998, follows a boy named Ash from Pallet Town, who dreams of becoming the world’s best Pokemon trainer, and his partner Pikachu. The cute, yellow, electric mouse Pokemon has been a pop culture phenomenon ever since.
For more than 1,100 episodes (and counting), Ash has travelled the world catching various Pokemon and battling countless other trainers. Whenever a new Pokemon game is released, Ash heads to the new region introduced in the game for a new story arc – although he remains perpetually 10 years old.
The films have generally aligned with the concurrent TV series and are understood to be a sort of side adventure in the shared universe. Because the movies assume audiences are familiar with this shared canon, they do not always explain the backstory behind every detail.
Released in the US in 1999, Pokemon: The First Movie takes place during the first TV series known as Pokemon: Indigo League, while Ash was travelling with human friends Misty and Brock as well as their Pokemon. Though the film went on to earn more than US$163 million worldwide and remains a beloved title among fans, it was not well received among US critics.
But the Pokemon franchise never looked back.
On the TV front, the latest series, which premiered in Japan timed to the release of the Pokemon Sword and Shield games last year, has shaken up the formula by featuring two lead protagonists and expanding their adventure to all the regions ever introduced instead of focusing on the setting of the latest game. It’s also the first to be overseen by someone other than Yuyama.
Even the movie series saw a reboot with 2017’s Pokemon the Movie: I Choose You! helmed by Yuyama. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the animated series, the director said he sought a story that would appeal to all generations of fans and revisited the moment that started it all: Ash meeting Pikachu.
Since then, the Pokemon films haven’t been tied to the continuity of the TV series. And now, with the Netflix release, they’ve gone back to the beginning.
Considering Pokemon: The First Movie has remained the franchise’s strongest performer in both the worldwide and Japanese box office, a remake trying to recapture that magic was, as Yuyama noted, inevitable.
