Pokémon: The First Movie Review

The first Pokémon film is a franchise movie that stops to ask whether its villain should exist. Giovanni has a scientist clone Mew from an eyelash to build a weapon, the clone wakes up as Mewtwo, and the only friend he makes in the lab, the rebuilt memory of the scientist's dead daughter, fades in front of him. Takeshi Shudo's script gives a children's film a real question about cloning and origin, and Kunihiko Yuyama stages Mewtwo's storm, his island palace and his army of cloned Pokémon with genuine menace.

The climax is the reason it lasts. Originals and clones fight until both sides are spent, Ash steps between Mewtwo and Mew and is turned to stone, and the tears of every Pokémon in the room, original and clone alike, bring him back. It is sentimental and it works, because the film has earned the idea that a creature is judged by its choices rather than by how it was made. The animation is television grade, which is what keeps it from the top of the scale, and the English version added a flatter anti-violence message that critics punished; the Japanese original is the better film. At home it was the second highest grossing Japanese film of 1998.