Part of growing up is learning how to stop judging Pokemon by their design. Don’t get me wrong, there are some unforgivably generic-looking Pokemon out there. I don’t know any diehard Pidove fans, and if your favorite Pokemon is Rattata I have to assume you eat Unfrosted Mini Wheats every morning while listening to something as unbearable as Maroon 5, post-Songs About Jane of course. There’s more to a Pokemon than the way it looks, though, and it took watching the Pokemon movies for me to realize that.
If you’ve only seen Mewtwo Strikes Back and Pokemon 2000, you’ve missed a lot of excellent films. Pokemon movies have been coming out every summer without fail for over 20 years, and every single one of them has added a ton of lore and history to the Pokemon mythos. The movies have opened my eyes to the value of Pokemon I otherwise wouldn’t have given a second thought to by developing the personalities and characteristics of so many ‘mons in a way the games never could.
The movies are especially good at showing off Legendary and Mythical Pokemon. Lugia has always been one of my favorites because it helped Ash save the Orange Islands in Pokemon 2000. We learned all about Lugia’s history as the protector of the Legendary Birds and its role in the Shamouti Prophecy. Those details give Lugia a strong identity that makes it more than just a weird looking dragon with oversized wing hands, and the movies manage to do that for almost every Legendary. I never thought much of Latios and Latias, but after learning about the way they brought the ocean to Alto Mare and protected it from corruption in Pokemon Heroes, they’re now some of my favorites.
As the movies went on, the stories just got better. Darkrai from Gen 4 has always struck me as Pokemon’s obnoxiously edgy character - the Reaper of Pokemon if you will. But Rise of Darkrai won me over by representing it as a sympathetic character. Everyone in Alamos Town hates and fears Darkrai, believing that it’s a menace and a vandal, but Darkrai wants to protect the city from the interdimensional battle raging between Dialga and Palkia, and the one way it can communicate with people is through visions in nightmares. Darkrai is Pokemon’s Batman, and I never knew how brilliant it was until the movie.
But it’s not just Legendary Pokemon that get to shine in the films. A lot of common Pokemon play supporting roles but still get to show off their personality. For example, Pokemon Ranger and the Temple of the Sea is all about the Mythical Pokemon Manaphy, but the unsung hero of the movie is actually Buizel. The Marina Group, a circus act that performs with Pokemon, has a pet Buizel who instigates the entire plot by revealing Manaphy’s egg to Ash and his friends. The curious water-weasel is quite puppy-like and inquisitive. It can inflate the yellow collar around its neck like a life-preserver to float, and it can also spin its tail around and fly like Tails from Sonic the Hedgehog. I’ve encountered hundreds of Buizel in the games and always ignored them, but now I think they’re some of the coolest Pokemon out there.
There are as many Pokemon stories as there are Pokemon, and I don’t think you can truly appreciate how fascinating each one is if you only play the games. It’s often the interactions between Pokemon that make them special, like the rivalry between Deoxys and Rayquaza in Destiny Deoxys. The games sometimes hint at these deeper stories, but they never give you the opportunity to really get to know each Pokemon the way the films do. Keldeo may look like a rejected My Little Pony, but Kyurem Vs The Sword of Justice showed that Keldeo is the Pokemon version of d’Artagnan from the Three Musketeers, and who doesn’t like d’Artagnan? I don’t hate any Pokemon anymore, and I have the Pokemon movies to thank for that.
Except Stunfisk. There’s simply no excuse for Stunfisk.