12/10/07: Pokémon: The First Movie (1999)Christmas villains are almost always against people having the freedom to spend their money. Burgermeister Meisterburger—of
Santa Claus Is Coming to Town—hates toys and forbids anyone to sell them.
How the Grinch Stole Christmas is self-explanatory. And, as we learned in the wake of Columbine, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was a ticking time bomb. What’s the only thing that reformed this freak into a useful member of society? The threat of children not getting their hard-earned toys.
In that tradition, we got a new Christmas classic in 1999. It was a big Thanksgiving film release from the Japanese. We’re referring, of course, to
Pokémon: The First Movie. Actually, the full title is
Pokémon: The First Movie—Mewtwo Strikes Back. We never did figure out how Mewtwo was striking back when he’s created for the first time in this first movie, but that’s okay. It was the end of the ’90s. We hadn’t been able to keep up with eleven grunge bands. We weren’t about to start bothering with 151 cute little monsters.
Anyway, the timing was perfect. Christmas was around the corner, and any kid would be terrified of a villain who’d come to liberate their toys.
Toy Story 2 was attempting the same plot, but it lacked a lovely heart of darkness.
As you might imagine, we originally went to see
Pokémon: The First Movie as part of a hipster mission. We had no idea that the thing would be so impressive. We also didn’t know there was an opening cartoon.
Pikachu’s Vacation turned out to be worth a ticket in itself. This short tale takes place on an island full of Pokémon, and it serves as a nice primer to the general weirdness.
First of all, these POcKEt MONsters make Teletubbies sound like James Earl Jones. Don’t bother trying to decipher the dialogue. Just marvel at this strangely competitive breed of pets that encompasses giant monsters and cuddly furballs. They’re capable of causing immense pain, and they love extreme behavior. At one point, two Pokémon have a race. Cute little Pikachu fires a starter pistol, and the resulting explosion evokes fond memories of Nagasaki.
Pikachu’s Vacation turned out to be far tripper than
Yellow Submarine, which had just been re-released earlier that year. When the thing ended, we just assumed 90 minutes had passed in a strange new way. Then the proper feature started, and nothing could have been further removed from the opening cartoon.
Pokémon: The First Movie begins like a Kubrick film, with the opening of a massive eye as a voiceover intones how life is the great miracle. The voice and eye belong to the feline Mewtwo, who is awaking to discover that he is a clone created by a group of scientists. Life may be the great miracle, but a pissed-off Pokémon clone comes in at a close second. Mewtwo promptly destroys the laboratory and the scientists who birthed him.
Then the person who funded the project emerges from the ashes, and offers to help Mewtwo channel his powers. Unfortunately, this offer involves the mystery man attempting to control Mewtwo’s behavior. The clone blows up the guy and his mansion. Say what you will about the Japanese, but they sure got over being squeamish about explosions.
Now it’s time for Mewtwo to get down to business. He’s out to free all the Pokémon. See, the Pokémon are like little gladiators who get carried around by their human masters. The humans routinely pit their Pokémon against each other. Mewtwo fancies himself to be enlightened, and his sensitive insight equates this with slavery.
The top Pokémon players are summoned to a mysterious tournament on the same island where Mewtwo was born. This leads to some amazing carnage, as Mewtwo clones the Pokémon and has the original monsters battle the imitations. Even weirder, the major battle scene takes place while an acoustic ballad plays on the soundtrack.
There’s some hinting about the ethics of cloning, but it all ends up as a metaphor for world economics. The Pokémon even revive a frozen human in the same way they’d revived that year’s retail toy season. (The year’s
Star Wars toys weren’t moving as expected.) Ultimately, though, the plot comes down to a little kid endangering his life to protect his toys. What message could be more seasonal?
Unfortunately, Mewtwo wasn’t the sole enemy of
Pokémon: The First Movie. The critics were gleeful in trashing the film. It’s bad enough that they couldn’t appreciate how the film’s storm sequence was more impressive than anything in
Titanic. Even if the film had been bad, it should’ve been measured by a child’s enthusiasm. Instead, the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution went so far as to give
Pokémon: The First Movie an F rating. It’s pretty telling how the year’s only other film to rank that low was
Dudley Do-Right.
That’s another reason why Christmas villains are so timeless: they’re always adults. Mewtwo is the only Pokémon who tries to live like a man, and that message makes for better Orwell than what TNT managed with 1999’s revamped
Animal Farm. Kids know not to trust adults when it comes to toys. There’s always some enlightened grown-up trying to explain why kids shouldn’t be allowed to play with the things.
Make it your own: Adding to our dormant confusion, it turns out that
Pokémon: The First Movie—Mewtwo Strikes Back is now listed on DVD as
Pokémon: The First Movie—Mewtwo vs. Mew. We don’t even remember Mew being a character in the first movie. At least that explains the villain’s name. Anyway, the DVD can be
had cheap, and it includes
Pikachu’s Vacation.
On an unsurprising note, you can try to track down the original Japanese version and be spared the scene at the end where everyone discusses how violence doesn’t solve anything.
