No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you. Yes, this is a real trailer for a new Pokémon movie, and yes, it does use CGI as opposed to 2D animation. Mewtwo Strikes Back Evolution will be the first fully CGI film based on Nintendo’s hugely popular franchise, and you can feast your eyes on the colorful trailer below.
According to Polygon, the film will serve as a kind of loose remake of Pokémon: The First Movie, which arrived in theaters all the way back in 1998. If you’ve been following the Pokémon films closely, you’ll know that the franchise was rebooted with Pokémon the Movie: I Choose You! in 2017, with Mewtwo Strikes Back Evolution being the third film in the new continuity. As is common with animated features, the film will have multiple directors, with Motonori Sakakibara, Tetsuo Yajima, and Kunihiko Yuyama all being credited.
Although the folks at Oriental Light and Magic clearly aren’t working with a Pixar budget, they did the best with what they had, and while the computer animation doesn’t exactly look groundbreaking, it still has a pretty slick feel to it. Although it may be strange for fans to see Ash, Misty, and Brock rendered in CG for the first time, and the fact that this trailer comes just a few days after Warner Bros. debuted the second trailer for Detective Pikachu doesn’t exactly help. Either way, this is still a bold new direction for the Pokémon franchise.
Pokémon the Movie: Mewtwo Strikes Back Evolution will be released by Toho in Japan on July 12. Just as they did with I Choose You! and The Power of Us, Fathom Events will distribute the film in US theaters later in the year.
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