Considering the sheer amount of fan art that is out there, it's sometimes easy to lose sight of the fact that each piece is a labor of love. In the case of one artist's recent project, the sheer amount of labor involved is hard to overlook. The project in question, an animation of the intro from 2000's Pokémon Silver, ultimately took more than 300 hours of work to complete.
Darren Rafferty, who goes by the moniker DARN, is the creator of the animated remake intro. Rafferty, an Irish artist and filmmaker who's currently an animation student at the University of Ulster, spent a lot of time and effort making sure that all the details in the original intro were included and elaborated upon.
The video of his animated version of the intro was first posted to Rafferty's YouTube account and still features the original 8-bit music from the video game. It goes on, beat by beat, to recreate the imagery of the video game version.
All in all, Rafferty's adaptation is spot on, only diverting from the original by adding and adjusting the details. For instance, the opening sequence of aquatic pokémon that moves upward through the ocean to see a Lapras swimming across the horizon originally set the scene in the daytime. Rafferty's version sets the scene at night, framing Lapras against a bright, full moon. Rafferty's animation style allows him to render a sequence of a Pikachu tackling a Jigglypuff with the sort of detailed foliage that the pixelated graphics of the original weren't able to capture.
First released in Japan in 1999 before being made available internationally in 2000, Pokémon Silver and its counterpart Pokémon Gold, were the first two games in the second generation of the Pokémon video game series. As of sales figures dating to 2010, Pokémon Gold and Pokémon Silver were the best selling games on the Game Boy Color, and came in as the third best selling games for the wider range of Game Boy systems as a whole.
Twenty years after the game's initial release, Pokémon Silver continues to leave a lasting impact in the hearts and minds of talented fans such as Rafferty. Considering the skills on display in his animated remake of the iconic game's intro, Rafferty's got a bright future ahead of him, and who knows? Maybe if he's got another three-to-four hundred hours to spare, he'll animate the intro to Pokémon Gold to even things out.
Source: YouTube/illbedarnd