Saturday, November 10, 2018

Being the worst Pokemon Movie is like being the poorest Billionaire

Looking back at the Top 5 Pokemon Movies post I made not too long ago, I already feel like my rankings have changed.  I don't think I can keep I Choose You in the top 5 after all, and it's certainly not actually better then Destiny Deoxys.

It's still a good movie, but I'm not sure how well the experiment always payed off.  When I watched it a second time I was loving it just as much as the first time right up until we first saw Charmander.  But from that point on it definitely started hitting me how these condensed versions of the Butterfree and Charizard arcs don't really work.

Spell of the Unown will always be number 1, Latios and Latias is 2.

Thing is there are people on YouTube making lists of their 5 or 10 worst Pokemon movies.  But it's pretty rare that I can call any Anime related to Pokemon bad, Origins was not exactly what I wanted but it was fun.

A number of people, like Anime America on YouTube think the Hoopa movie is sooo very bad.  Sorry but I had a lot of fun with it.

The least of the Theatrically released films in my opinion is still Jirachi, but now that I'm over my initial reaction to it I can see that it's still fine.

For me, the only Pokemon Anime that flat out makes me upset in Mastermind of the Mirage Pokemon, and I blame it's failure fully on the involvement of Westerners helping write it.  But even it has it's defenders.

Pokemon simply has an inherently winning formula, as long as you get it, it's pretty easy to do well.

And so it's not any Disney sabotaging DC conspiracy theories that make me disregard Rotten Tomatoes, it's the fact that no Pokemon movie gets over 30% on the site.

Too many professional critics, especially in the west, simply can't respect what Pokemon is going for, and when it's your job you don't get to just not review something.  So they got lots of negative reviews for being exactly what they're supposed to be, consequence free fun.

And Rotten Tomatoes marks all reviews as either Rotten or Fresh, no middle ground.  And there have been reports of reviews being labeled Rotten by the site that ultimately said more good then bad, reviews that would be a 6 on an out of 10 system like MAL's.

So those two factors together mean a site like Rotten Tomatoes is incapable of telling the truth about Pokemon movies, which is that they pretty much never fail.

All I want is for them to be fun, I want scenes that are irrelevant to the plot that are just the Pokemon being cute and having fun.  And I want the characters to simply be likeable, every movie doesn't need to be some vital new character arc for Ash.  And every theatrical Pokemon film does at least that, and some manage to do more.

There are some popular Pokemon movies I'm not as hot on as most fans seem to be, the Lucario film didn't quite connect with me, and in-spite of my unique Nostalgia for them I can't label either of the first two a favorite.  But I would never call them bad movies.

So that's why you'll never see a top 5 worst Pokemon movie list from me, not unless a slew of unlikely failures happen in the future.  If you're willing to accept each movie on it's own terms you can never really go wrong.

No comments:

Post a Comment