Two years ago I commented on this relationship in a post that now feels fairly disorganized. Wedding Peach is in my opinion one of the most underrated Magical Girl shows, so I want to keep reminding Pokémon fans why they should check it out.
Both the Wedding Peach and Pokémon Anime were produced by a studio called OLM which stands for Oriental Light and Magic. As far as individuals go that begins with Producers Iwata Keisuke and Shūkichi Kanda. But the creative key player was director Kunihiko Yuyama and his right hand Norihiko Sudo.
Takeshi Shudo and Junki Takegama, two of the top Writers on the Pokémon Anime, weren't Wedding Peach alumni, but they had worked with Yuyama previously on the Minky Momo franchise. They are probably the most important creatives working on the early Pokémon Anime who weren't involved with Wedding Peach.
Sayuri Ichiishi was a Character Designer for Pokémon and an Animator on Wedding Peach who was promoted to co-character designer for the DX OVAs. Other important overlap would include Art Director Katsuyoshi Kanemura, Sound Director Mima Masafumi, Photography Director Motoaki Ikegami and then Norihiro Yoshikawa & Tsuyoshi Watanabe who drew backgrounds.
In recent years my revisiting of the early Pokémon Anime has frequently gone along side my enjoyment of Suede's Pokemon Journey series on YouTube. The main differences between my opinions on Pokémon and his are that I'm less critical in general, I'm notoriously easy to please especially where Pokémon is concerned. The second episode is a good example of one where I can't relate to any of his criticisms, I enjoy it's chaotic structure. However the ones he considers the best are generally also ones I consider top tier, and the ones he seems to most dislike are generally ones I would not recommend as being good first impressions, at least as far as Kanto and early Orange Islands go. In one video done looking back on the Kanto era he specially talked about what he liked about early Pokémon's backgrounds and as I said above two key background artists came from Wedding Peach.
Suede particularly likes to praise Yuji Asada as a Storyboarder and Msaaki Iwane as an Animation Director, especially them as a team. On the subject of Asada I'm envious of his ability to know enough about Animation to know specifically what to give credit to the Storyboards for, remember usually the Episode director is also who does the Storyboards. Asada also worked on Wedding Peach, he did the Storyboards for 8 episodes the first of which was episode 3 and the last of which was the penultimate episode. While Iwane didn't get promoted to Animation Director till somewhat deep into Pokémon, he was working as an Animator before then, and even back in Wedding Peach the episodes he worked on were usually the same ones as Yuji Asada.
Suede mostly only seems interested in naming the writer of an episode he's reviewing when it's one of the two I mentioned above who weren't from Wedding Peach. However Yukiyoshi Ohashi is a former Wedding Peach writer who's Pokémon episodes tend to also be ones Suede likes, seemingly specifically for their writing. On Wedding Peach it's not till episode 5 we get one he wrote, which is quicker then their Pokémon debut being episode 7. Ohashi also wrote a lot of Macross 7 and three episodes of Cutey Honey Flash which is interesting.
However the other Wedding Peach writer to come over to Pokémon was Hideki Sonoda, and at least in the very early period of Pokémon his episodes tend to be ones Suede considers not well written, for reasons I consider understandable even if I'm not as hard on them. However Sonoda must have gotten better because he co-wrote the 3rd movie, Spell of the Unown, which Suede and Linkara seem to like me consider the best movie by a significant margin, then he was the sole writer of the next several movies, some are better then others but I enjoy all to some degree, I don't currently know what Suede thinks of Heroes and up but I tend to favor the odd numbers all through that first decade. Sonoda's pre Wedding Peach experience was mostly Shoujo stuff, so perhaps doing a Shonen like Pokémon was something he needed more time then other writers to adjust to. His first Wedding Peach episode like his first Pokémon episode was the 4th.
Some other overlap between Wedding Peach and Pokémon creatives include Yoshitake Fujimoto and Toshiaki Suzuki as Directors/Storyboards, Izuma Shimura another Animator and Hisashi Kagawa who also worked on Sailor Moon.
I can understand why even some Magical Girl fans have trouble getting into Wedding Peach, it certainly starts off not seeming all that unique, in fact the way it uses wedding related Tropes can at times remind me of one of my least favorite Sailor Moon episodes, you really have to give it time to find it's footing. Episode 6 played an important role in selling me on the show, that's twice the usual 3 episode test and still a ways from when it really gets good.
I wish the show had also been Dubbed by the same people who Dubbed Pokémon, the same voice actors at least. I know to some people "you'd prefer 4Kids" sounds like the most offensive thing ever. But I will take cringy censorship/localization decisions with VAs I like over a more strictly faithful script with weaker VAs any day. The Wedding Peach Dub was distributed by ADV but doesn't seem to have the same Voice Actors usually associated with old ADV Dubs either. If the Wedding Peach Dub VAs are people I've liked in other Dubs, I wasn't able to recognize them.
Update June 2022: Suede's Pokémon Journey is gone.
I'm actually way late in making this update, given it happened not long after I made this post. It's frustrating I was planning to make this months before I did and always planning to use Suede's series as a key reference point, and then it was suddenly gone.
Good news is he's going to try starting over in a new format. it will take over a year to redo all of the Kanto episodes I had in mind writing this, and that's IF it doesn't also get taken down.
https://www.youtube.com/c/SuedesPapermonJourney/featured
Update December 2022: There is a Torrent that should contain all the episodes now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1ap4HGmyiA
It's also worth reminding people how episode 26 of Seude's Pokémon journey (which fortunately has a re-upload on YT at the moment) is what informed me of the Wedding Peach and Pokémon connection in the first place, I was already a fan of this obscure show so learning this connection inspired me to dig deeper.
This episode was one of the Hideki Sonoda episodes which again Suede was pretty critical of and I'm inclined to agree that Celadon should have gotten a whole mini-arc. It did make sense to use Erika's Gym as the opportunity to explicitly reference their prior show, it being the Girl Power Gym was already established in the Games and most Wedding Peach girls were named after Flowers, plus a literal Peach based Pokémon would probably also be a Grass Type.
Thinking about Suede and the Erika episode again has reminded me that I didn't discus the voice actor connections in this post. I consider the behind the scenes talent more important to explaining why the Pokémon Anime was the way it was, especially given how Japanese Animation is done differently then in the west where the Voice Work is recorded after all the Animation is done.
Still the voice of Momoko, Kyoko Hikami being the voice of Erika in both her original episode and the 2017 I Choose You movie is a cool connection. In 2017 it's safe to say few would have noticed or cared if Erika had a different voice, plus her being the only Gym leader to get a Cameo in the film was kind of random itself. I think Kinihiko Yuyama might have been intending that film to be his swan song originally and that working with the star of Wedding Peach again may have been the whole reason Erika is even in that film.
But she's not the only Voice Actor the two shows have in common. The two male leads of Wedding Peach are also the Japanese voices of Brock and James (Takeshi and Kojiro), and the third most prominent human male character in Wedding Peach shares a voice actor with Todd Snap (but he's perhaps most famous for being the voice of Shinichi Kudo the true form of Detective Conan). Each of the other three Love Angels would also get to be a one off Pokémon character eventually but they took longer. The voice of Aphrodite was eventually cast as Brock's mother Lola. It may also interest some to know that the voice of Sailor Moon, Kotono Mitsuishi was a Wedding Peach antagonist and a few Pokémon characters.
Update March 2023: And now Suede's journey is being restored via Google Drive Links on Patreon.
https://www.patreon.com/m/87441/posts
https://www.patreon.com/m/87441/posts?filters[tag]=Pokemon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6B-_p8MMRpg
Update April 2023: And it's finally up on the Internet Archive, this link leads to the first 34 episodes but more are uploaded as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment