The first in the ‘Hoen’ era of Pokemon movies ‘Pokemon Heroes’ ditches the numerical titling and tries to shake things up a bit over the previous movies with…mixed results I think its fair to say.

For this entry they decide to essentially trial something i’ve said they really should have been doing from the start, which is telling a story they *could* tell in the anime series with limitations. But giving it a filmic budget and attention to really help get the absolute best out of it. And while I think they’ve largely achieved that brief here, its just a shame they chose the plotline they did here.

So the entire film is set on the island village of ‘Alto Mare’ and its estbalished that, according to island folk law, long ago a devestating event rained down destruction on the island and flooded the island. In a time of crisis it was foretold that two young boys, desperate to protect their family and their island home, were transformed into the mythical pokemon Latias and Latios. And together, they were able to save the day, with one of the boys being sacrified and its power effectively reincarnated into a magical orb that was hidden for safe keeping.

Cut to the present day and Ash, Brock and Misty are all taking a bit of a break in Alto ahead of their first steps into the Hoen region. Ash and Misty choose to take part in a Pokemon ‘Surf’ race, but while the race is on. Latias appears and takes a shine to Ash, helping him almost win the race, before transforming into a young girl and running off.

While all of this is going on, its also revealed that Giovanni is once again back on the scene and has sent special agents: ‘Annie’ and ‘Oakley’ to attempt to capture both Latias AND Latios AND to find and collect the magic orb to reactivate a defense device the citizens of Alto created centuries ago, should an evil presence ever return.

When ‘Annie’ and ‘Oakly’ realise that Latias is running around Alto disguised as a girl, they track her down and are about ready to capture her when Ash spots them, fends them off and gets Latias to safety. Its here that he meets Lorenzo and Bianca, Lorenzo works at a kind of museum/historic building housing the defense device and remnants of that fateful day in the history of Alto…And Bianca is his Assistant? Daughter? random Arty person he knows? Who knows…in either case both of them look after both Latias and Latios in secret and Latias has taken to transforming into Bianca because it likes her.

and…the rest of the movie could best be summed up as Annie and Oakly trying to get SOME kind of a foothold on their plan to capture the pair of mythic pokemon OR find the orb. And Ash and co learning more about Altos history and trying their best to protect Lorenzo and co to avoid the Defense weapon from falling into the wrong hands…Oh…and Team Rocket are in this and…seemingly have fallen back into the place they were in ‘Pokemon 3’ where they’re in the film…but thats about it.

And probably the biggest gripe I have with this film is its script sadly, while I think this would have been a great 2 parter in the anime, here it feels like the kind of plot thats best enjoyed as two 25 minute TV episodes with a cliffhanger, rather than one LONG hour and 10 minute feature. that 20 minutes uninterrupted may not seem like a lot, but the first act offers SO so much, before the 2nd and 3rd act kind of slup into what effectively amounts to a runaround. and not a particularly engaging one.

While the film DOES end with at least a couple of twists and turns I didnt fully expect, and it ends about as solidly as these films can end. the slump sucks SO much life out of this production. Its also one of the first Pokemon films i’ve watched that seems a bit uncertain of the tone to take. It clearly WANTS to tell a darker more serious story, but because this is a child friendly franchise and because the series seems at this point to want to do a little bit of a ‘reset button’ to try and appeal to a younger audience (bearing in mind that the 10 year olds who got into pokemon in 1997/1998 when it hit the west, would now have been 16 possibly 17 by the time this film landed in the US/EU in 2004.) we end up with a kind of dark story, being told with kid gloves…Sometimes that can work, but here it results in a film that feels like it lacks commitment to either lane, being a bit too overbasic in places for the older pokemon crowd to really want to fully get into it, but at the same time being a bit TOO complicated for this younger audience to really want to stick around all that long.

There’s also a bit of a crowded cast list here, its been bad in the other Pokemon movies, with usually either Team Rocket or Brock and Misty getting essentially forgotten about barring an occasional check in…But here, barring the opening race sequence, Brock, Misty AND Team Rocket are all basically totally forgotten, barring one or two moments where they write them in, not to add to the plot, but simply to tell the audience that the writers havent COMPLETELY forgotten about them.

Throw in a wobbly act structure, and while this script is by NO means the worst one to make it to a ‘Pokemon Movie’. Its probably the shakiest one i’ve seen since ‘Pokemon 2000’.

Other than that though, its pretty solid all round, the visuals for this entry have gotten a HUGE upgrade, rather than trying to portray grand and sweeping locations, this film revels in really getting the audience into every side ally and market square in Alto. and theres an almost quasi ‘Studio Ghibli’ feel to some of these street settings. It looks cheaper than ‘Ghibli’ obviously, but its still really nice to see after a near half a dozen films of eithe vast unbroken forests and canyons and not much else, or experiments from H.R Geigers back catalogue.

They’ve also toned back the CG usage as well, or rather, the technology has caught up enough that marrying up CG with hand drawn or semi digital animation no longer looks totally hideous and actually kind of blends in quite nicely. This is probably the prettiest looking Pokemon movie of the series thus far and I feel that the director really gave me what I want out of a filmic Pokemon story. ground level views of the towns and cities and the pokemon that inhabit it.

The performances are solid enough, nothing noteworthy as being good or awful, they’re all about as solid as they usually are. The score seems much happier to use beefed up versions of music from the anime series, which Im happier with truthfully, with only 1 or 2 pop songs reminding me that this is the early 2000s and pop is still ruling the roost.

Overall, Eh…I think if push came to shove i’d narrowly choose this one over ‘Pokemon 4 Ever’ But this is a fairly pedestrian feature where I got more enjoyment watching the detail of the location animations and all the small things like villagers running around or working. Than the actual plotline which I feel was holding back on what it really wanted to show.

If your into Pokemon and looking for the better entries, this one is fine enough. But I absolutely wouldnt say it was essential.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/pokemon-heroes/