Thank goodness there’s a Miyazaki film opening simultaneously. It offsets the shrill siren song of kid-lite marketing that heralds the arrival of — gasp! choke! — the fourth feature-length Pokémon movie. If you haven’t heard of Pokémon before, well, sleep well with dreams unblighted by visions of tiny Pikachu, my friend. Some of us are not so lucky. Based on the mad, bad, and dangerous-to-play trading-card game of the same name, in which kids compete to tame and raise various species of wily little “pocket monsters” and become Pokémon masters, the title of this outing is best taken as a threat. This time out, pint-sized Pokémon nutjob Ash and his friend-for-life Pikachu meet up with a young Pokémon fan from days of yore, who has been unceremoniously fast-forwarded through time thanks to a teardrop-shaped Pokémon by the name of Celebi. While Ash and his pals struggle to help their buddy, an evil Pokémon master attempts to capture the Celebi and thereby rule the world. Sadly, the world of Pokémon is chock full of bad, bad, bad animation and helium-voiced youths so patently annoying that an animated, all-singing, all-dancing, all-talking ducks version of The Sorrow and the Pity begins to seem strangely appealing. Mixing traditional crap animation with some new-fangled CGI (still crap, but shinier), Pokémon 4Ever is a goldmine for those seeking to plumb the depths of the immortal soul, crap and all. Can it be merely a coincidence that the film’s blatantly homoerotic subtext (Ash and cohort Sammy cling better than Saran Wrap) echoes and intensifies the classic struggle of the gender-oppressed while at the same time branching out into whole new realms of sucktacular animation? Probably. Likely. Sure, why the hell not? Coupled with an intro cartoon (“Pikachu Goes Bananas,” or something like that) apparently so uninteresting that I can’t recall seeing it, this is rote drivel aimed at Mom and Dad’s wallet. Why the Pokémon fad hasn’t died off yet is one of the great mysteries of the universe, right up there with the Pyramids of Gaza and the white stuff in Twinkies.
This article appears in October 11 • 2002.