Quite late to this party.
I can’t say I am a diehard fan of Pokémon but I do enjoy it when I watched the anime when I was a kid. I also make sure I played at least one Pokémon game per generation of Nintendo console. And for a period of time I was addicted to Pokémon Go! However, with the life action ‘Pokémon Detective Pikachu’ movie, I was not particularly interested. Partly I found it weird that we have Ryan Reynolds to voice Pikachu, because it was such a Japanese thing. Rest assure I am not being over sensitive about racial correctness and I love Ryan Reynolds as an actor a lot, I just found it hard to correlate him with Pikachu…or may that’s the selling point for the producer of this movie.
I did not catch it (pun intended) when it was in the theatres, but finally saw it on a lazy Friday evening when I was too exhausted from a horrid week of work. I did not have any expectations. For it was just a no brainer movie for a tired Friday night that I did not want to go to bed at 7pm.
The experience was a pleasant surprise.
What struck me most at the beginning was it opened with two non-Caucasian characters. To be honest with you, I had that biased view that it would be quite a white washed movie when they had Ryan Reynolds to voice Pikachu, but I was proven wrong. After an opening scene with full on thriller action, the film opened up with Justice Smith as Tim Goodman our main protagonist and Karan Soni as Jack, his best friend. That was quite a departure from my expectations and that’s when I started paying more attention to what’s on the screen. As expected, all the cute Pokémons we get to know over the years through anime and video games were meticulously created CGI characters, but in the fictional city of Ryme, there were as much racial diversity as the Pokémons themselves.
Tim’s father’s colleague was played by Ken Watanabe, a well-known Japanese actor for many years in the East, although I did think his character was underutilised and quite token to please the Japanese audience. I personally wanted to see more of him. He is capable of more than a few lines and expressions in awe (like how the Godzilla films used him). The city’s creator was Bill Nighy in his full British accent, and of course Tim’s mum and grandma are both African American. This diverse cast inside the diverse city of Ryme where Pokémon and humans live harmoniously together looks like a Utopia for all Pokémon lovers. It is not about humans owning Pokémons for battle but about their partnership. But of course, underneath that whole visage something more insidious was brooding.
Without giving away too much, ‘Pokémon Detective Pikachu’ has all the twists and turns in its plot as you would expected and as Tim navigates through this new experience while trying to track down his father, who is sometimes presumed dead and sometimes not, he learnt that life in Ryme is a lot more complicated than his small home town. I personally found Justice Smith’s Tim competent enough but would love to see more layers from the character. There are scenes that I knew what the director was trying to achieve but not quite really reached me emotionally. Maybe I was tired maybe I was not. But Ryan Reynolds did surprisingly bring the talking Pikachu quite to life, although at times I felt like Deadpool had morphed into Pikachu in a different city. The CGI Pikachu was cute, very cute, while for other Pokémons I think there are hit and misses. It is quite hard to balance between realistic live action character model and the cutesy original of the anime and video games. I think most of the time they managed to do it, just that sometimes it does feel odd when you saw an apparently cartoonish Pokémon sitting or walking along side the human characters.
I personally think I have misjudged ‘Pokémon Detective Pikachu’ prematurely when it hit the theatres. It could be my bias or it could be my fear of having my childhood imagination destroyed by a cash cow Hollywood effort. It turned out it was quite entertaining when I did not bring any baggage or presumption to watch it. As a piece of entertainment, it was quite enjoyable, and I was particularly impressed that this movie finally managed to reflect the diversity of our world in this fictional reality of the city of Ryme. Maybe the diverse species of Pokémon had final awaken our understanding of our real world, but in any sense, it is a much better effort than the white washed ‘Last Airbander’ and ‘Ghost in the Shell’.
If you want something easy and enjoyable for a lazy night in, I do recommend ‘Pokémon Detective Pikachu’, although you would feel more engaged if you were a fan of the series, either the anime or the video games.
