Below are a couple of older reviews I made of Pocket Monsters The Movie "Revelation Lugia" & "Pikachu's Exploration Party" back in 2015.

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Pocket Monsters The Movie "Pikachu's Exploration Party"
So the first Pikachu short was this weird, trippy drug trip with a paper thin plot interrupted by psychedelic eyecatches. The second Pikachu short, on the other hand, goes for the much more conservative "let's make this something people can actually follow along with" style of storytelling.

It kind of works? I mean the movie starts off with a very Alice in Wonderland like trip through a hole that makes you think that this is going to be an acid trip like the first one but then ends up being ust a regular ol' story about finding some seeds that look like cracked eggs inside a big tree village thing. There's some fun to be had - Kabigon and Koduck both steal the show, as far as I'm concerned - but you can definitely tell that the producers of this thing didn't allow themselves to have as much fun as they did with the first short. Had the franchise just become too big at this point for them to be able to experiment the way they could back in 1998? Was there pressure from the people upstairs to make this Pikachu movie less weird?

The main plot about finding Tamatama's missing eggs is clever enough I guess. I'm not super fond of the middle part with the dancing Kireihana and the Pippi because it doesn't match the rest of the episode at all but things get back on track once the storm kicks in and the episode ends on a strong note. The Nyarth subplot doesn't really go anywhere and Matadogas and Arbok are conspicuously absent but it doesn't really hurt too much at the end of the day.

Also, Satoshi, Kasumi, and Kenji apparently have the power to sleep through massive rainstorms.

The animation in this episode has its moments -- there are a lot of fantastic facial expressions and poses throughout -- but there's also some unforgivably awful animation in here as well. I guess they spent most of their animation budget on the main film? That POV shot where a bunch of clip art Pokémon sit atop tree branches is pretty awful, and there's also this one shot where the Pokémon are clapping and it's literally just two frames of animation repeated over and over. And then there's the tree swaying in the wind and the shitty looking fire! At this point in the franchise's life I feel like there had been episodes of the TV series (which, to be clear, was pretty low budget even for the time) that looked better and that's just baffling.

Pocket Monsters The Movie "Revelation Lugia"
After the unexpected success of the first movie a second movie was quickly put into production. Part of the discussions, according to screenplay writer Takeshi Shudo, was about how Mewtwo Strikes Back was great and all but don't you think it was a little bit too dark and scary? The decision to make the next movie a more light-hearted, adventurous fare was quickly made and the result is Revelation Lugia.

Did they succeed? I'd say so. The movie still has some of that Takeshi Shudo pretentiousness, with characters abruptly going off into these heady existential tangents that are completely out-of-place in a movie like this, but on the whole I feel like it's a much more age-appropriate film than the first one. Part of the problem I had with Mewtwo Strikes Back is that it had all these pre-requisites needed in order to fully enjoy it; with Revelation Lugia there's no need to listen to an hour-long CD drama or look up background information on each character. Just watch it, enjoy the Toho monster movie-esque battle between legendary Pokémon, and leave the theater happy.

Oh, and don't forget to turn off your brain. There are some real head scratchers in this one, including but not limited to: If Gelardan had captured Freezer then wouldn't that have restored balance as well, just the other way? Why is the weather in this movie calm except for when the plot calls for it to be crazy? Did whoever was piloting the helicopter that Dr. Ookido and the others were riding in die? Why didn't Satoshi hand the GS Ball over to Dr. Ookido when he had the chance?

This movie introduces us to a bunch of new characters with Gelardan standing out the most. He's a kind of fanatical man-child who lives in his own world and doesn't care what happens to the world the rest of us live in as long as he gets what he wants. He's more of an antagonist more than a villain because he's not doing any of the awful things he does out of malice or any other wicked intent and that's a lot of what makes him so interesting. His voice actor, Takeshi Kaga, brings a classiness to the character that few can and I just love love love the way he says "collection" throughout the film.

The other new character is Fleura, aka the character who was seemingly created to make shippers across the globe the happiest they'll ever be short of Satoshi getting down on one knee and proposing. I can't think of any other production in this franchise where the relationship between Satoshi and Kasumi is ever addressed this bluntly and it's kind of great that the movie was actually allowed to go as far as it did. Otherwise Fleura's OK but she doesn't really do much of anything after she sets up the movie's plot until the very, very end of the movie. 

And the Rocket-Dan! This is the movie in which my favorite characters have the biggest roles and I absolutely love it. Everything about their role in this movie and the reasoning behind them helping Jaari Boy out is perfectly done and I just love that they're given as much screentime as they are. This movie is constantly brought up during retrospectives as "the movie where the Rocket trio play the biggest role" and whenever I see those I'm like "well, yeah...but you know there's nothing stopping you from giving them bigger roles in future movies, right?" Needless to say I wish more movies handled them like this but I'm happy with what I've got.

Looking at Revelation Lugia it's obvious that this was a film with a much, much higher animation budget. Stuff like Gelardan's flying airship were rendered (poorly) in 3D but there are a ton of other scenes that were hand drawn but were clearly mapped out by computers and then traced over later. There are a lot of shots where the camera spins around various objects and anyone who's studied animation will tell you that shots like those aren't easy to make without some kind of help. The water animation is pretty great here as well and the big battle between Lugia and the legendary birds -- something that's kind of tame by today's standards but was absolutely unprecedented at the time -- looks fantastic. The movie has a few animation hiccups (there's this one shot of Pikachu jumping off a boat where they forgot to do any in-between animation whatsoever) but for the most part this movie's a visual feast.

On the soundtrack side of things, Shinji Miyazaki manages to produce yet another masterpiece. There are so many great pieces of music in this movie and the fact that the majority of it wasn't included on the movie's soundtrack is an absolute crime. Luckily a lot of the music will be reused for the TV series so we'll get to hear it again and again.

The English dub of Mewtwo Strikes Back was awful and to be honest 4Kids’ version of The Power of One isn't much better. This time 4Kids adds this ridiculous “one person can make all the difference!” moral that’s not in the original version at all which I guess is at least consistent with what they did to the first movie. The dub-only theme in this movie is a bit more ridiculous, however, since the events of the movie itself actively contradict the lines 4Kids makes the characters deliver:

• Fleura told Satoshi what he needed to do in order to fulfill the legend.
• The captain drove him to Fire Island in her boat.
• Pikachu communicated with Thunder to find out what was happening.
• Nyarth translated.
• Satoshi's Pokémon helped him free Fire.
• Gelardan got Satoshi to Thunder Island, unintentional as that was.
• Yadoking tells Satoshi where to put the orbs.
• His Pokémon, again, for pulling his makeshift sled across the frozen ocean to Ice island.
• Lugia, for fighting off the legendary birds as they attacked.
• The Rocket-Dan for getting him the rest of the way to the island.
• Lugia, again, for flying him back to Earthia Island.
• Kasumi for pulling his drowning ass out of the water.
• Fleura for playing the song that ended all the fighting.

Revelation Lugia is a movie about co-existence and how we're not all that strong by ourselves but if we work together and combine our strengths we can achieve a much greater power and then the dub comes along and is like “nah, who cares about other people, I'm awesome.”

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