Welcome back to Pokemon Movies in Review, a weekly recap of the entire Pokemon cinematic universe. This week, we’re revisiting Pokemon 4Ever, the last Pokemon movie to use traditional cel animation. Pokemon 4Ever, also known as Celebi: Voice of the Forest, Celebi: Encounter Beyond Time, and Celebi: A Timeless Encounter, dives deeper into themes of environmental protection more than any Pokemon movie before it. Its story is fairly unremarkable in the grand scheme of the Pokemon universe, but it does one very important thing: Pokemon 4Ever is a time-loop movie with a twist that recontextualizes everything we know about the Pokemon anime. There are better Pokemon movies out there - and better eco-fantasies - but Pokemon 4Ever had a bigger impact on the overarching Pokemon lore than perhaps any other film in the series.
The movie begins 40 years prior to the present day with a young boy named Sammy hiking through the forest. He stumbles upon the Mythical Pokemon Celebi on the run from a Pokemon hunter and tries to save it. The hunter intends to capture Celebi and auction it off to the highest bidder, but Sammy protects the fabled Time Travel Pokemon and helps it escape. Celebi is badly injured, but it focuses its power and creates a time rift, sending both it and Sammy into the present where they encounter Ash and his friends.
Unaware of Celebi, Ash carries an unconscious Sammy to see Diana and her grandmother, a pair of forest dwellers, who explain to them that Celebi is the protector of the forest. The heroes find the injured Celebi hiding nearby and take it to the Lake of Life, which restores it to full strength.
The rest of the movie carries on exactly as you would expect if you’ve seen films like Avatar, Emerald Forest, Pocahontas, or FernGully: The Last Rainforest. Ash and Sammy are shown the natural world through Celebi’s eyes, and learn to appreciate its beauty and wonder in a way they never had before. First, Celebi brings them to a tree that grows delicious fruit they’ve never tasted. At dawn, Celebi takes them to watch hundreds of Metapod evolve into Butterfree. Celebi even gives them the power to fly so they can see the forest as it does, and it's clear that the experience makes a big impact on the young trainers.
Eventually, a Team Rocket grunt called the Iron Masked Marauder shows up with a plan to use Celebi’s powers for evil. The Marauder captures Celebi using a dark PokeBall, similar to the shadow PokeBalls in Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness and Pokemon GO. The special PokeBall raises Celebi’s power level and turns it evil, according to the Marauder, and soon Celebi begins destroying the forest from within a massive, mech-like beast made of logs and branches. Just when it seems like the Marauder has successfully turned Celebi against the forest and all hope is lost, Suicune, the embodiment of the north winds, appears. With Suicune’s help, Ash and Sammy are able to defeat the Marauder and rescue Celebi.
After the battle, Celebi is once again badly injured, but not even the waters from the Lake of Life can save it this time. Celebi is revived by a dozen past and future versions of itself, who arrive in the present to lend it their power. Celebi and Sammy return to the past and Ash leaves the forest with his friends, eager to start their next adventure. The end.
Or at least you’d think that’s the end. However, while the credits roll and we watch Ash wave goodbye to Diana and her grandmother, we see a short scene of Professor Oak and Tracey back in Pallet Town. Tracey knocks over a stack of journals and opens one up to discover a series of drawings made by Sammy earlier in the film. It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, but it reveals something massive about the Pokemon series. Sammy is in fact Professor Samuel Oak, Ash’s mentor and father figure.
The American version of the movie makes this reveal a lot more explicit with an alternate ending. After leaving, Ash and his friends call Oak to tell them about their adventure. Ash is sad that he might never see his friend again, but Professor Oak assures him that he’ll be reunited with Sammy someday. As the kids hang up, Misty wonders how Oak knew Sammy’s name without them saying it. We then see Oak back in his lab looking through Sammy’s sketchbook - it’s not exactly subtle.
This is a Terminator-level reveal that changes everything we know about Ash Ketchum and Professor Oak. We know a bit about Oak’s history after he returned to his own time thanks to the anime and novelizations. After training Pokemon in his youth, Oak went on to become a professor at Celadon University. He continued to research and study interactions between Pokemon and humans - thanks to his childhood experience with Celebi no doubt - until one day he met his most important student: Delia Ketchum.
Pokemon 3 revealed that Oak was once the teacher of both Spencer Hale and Delia Ketchum, likely at Celadon University. We know both Delia and Oak eventually settled in Pallet Town, so it's reasonable to assume that Oak recognized the name Ketchum and became close with Delia, knowing she would eventually give birth to Ash. Knowing that Ash would one day become best friends with Pikachu, Oak must have taken fate into his own hands to ensure the events of Pokemon 4 would come to pass.
How long has Oak been working to engineer Ash’s fate? I’d like to think that Professor Oak was in control every step of the way. Maybe Oak introduced Delia to Ash’s dad and suggested the name Ash to them when she got pregnant. Perhaps he snuck into Ash’s room the night before everyone chose their starting Pokemon to destroy his alarm clock and make sure he was late. Most importantly, Oak must have spent his whole life looking for Ash’s Pikachu just so he could bring them together when the time was right. Oak’s Back to the Future escapades would make for a fantastic movie, and I’d love to see just how involved he was in Ash’s life even before he was born.
The connection goes even deeper. When Sammy shows Ash his drawings in Pokemon 4Ever, Ash tells him it's like a handmade Pokedex, and explains to Sammy what a Pokedex is. Professor Oak later invents the Pokedex thanks to Ash. The entire world of Pokemon would have been a very different place if Sammy and Ash had not met in Pokemon 4Ever. This also gets into some pretty fascinating territory about separate timelines occurring simultaneously and perpetually - the past influences the future and vice versa.
Plenty of Pokemon movies have promised to change the status quo. In Pokemon 2000, Ash discovers he’s the chosen one, Misty acknowledges her feelings for Ash, and Team Rocket vows to become good guys. Of course, all of those developments were forgotten as soon as the next episode arrived. Pokemon is often criticized for never moving forward, but Pokemon 4Ever did something pretty remarkable. By changing the past, the entire Pokemon universe was recontextualized. It doesn’t matter if Ash ever learns the truth about Oak or if this plotline is ever brought up again, because it permanently changed the way we think about Ash and Oak’s relationship. You can’t say that about any other Pokemon movie - that’s what makes Pokemon 4Ever so special.
This whole thing also puts a fun new wrinkle in all those theories about Oak and Ash’s Mom hooking up, huh?
Next week, we’ll be revisiting Pokemon Heroes: Latios & Latias, the lowest-grossing Pokemon movie of all time, and one of the only instances where a Pokemon actually dies on screen. I can’t wait.