- Critic Score
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75The favorable three-star rating I'm giving the animated Pokémon: The First Movie is based at least partly on the fact that I expected to dislike it and didn't.
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75The Japanese animation is beautiful, and the script adaptation for the English-speaking audience is well-paced, clever, and absorbing enough to keep parents from squirming.
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70By the time the fighting between clones and their originals turned to fraternal bonding, I was quite moved, even blissed out.
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63What a mere adult reviewer has to say about this 70-minute film is probably irrelevant. Pokémon fans will see it -- and love it -- regardless.
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63The film is obviously a long-form episode of a show better digested in 22-minute segments.
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But the animation, with its rich colors and stylized angles, is fun to watch and at times does seem like a psychedelic "Sesame Street."
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58A dismayingly impersonal piece of anime, genial yet chaotic.
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50It's just a sound-and-light show, linked to the marketing push for Pokemon in general.
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The sense that the movie serves mostly to showcase a slew of purchasable cartoon figures loses nothing in the translation.
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50Strictly a kids' movie, but parents may be relieved to sit back and enjoy the fact that for two full hours, they won't have to hear the kids asking them to buy any more Pokemon trading cards.
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50Essentially, the film functions as a holiday catalog, introducing fans to a new Pokemon whose effigy they can collect in trading cards.
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50It isn't terrible. It's far from a milestone in Japanese animation, and not an especially memorable entertainment. Yet it doesn't try to be either of those things.
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50Plays a little like a pacifistic variation on Bruce Lee's "Enter the Dragon."
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50Girls -- a big part of the Pokemon crowd and what makes it such a humongous commercial success -- will feel left out in the cold.
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40Are the little ones really getting anything more out of this slightly flashier, exceedingly louder 75-minute version of their usual 30-minute dose of anime hijinks?
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30There is a new definition of the term, "critic-proof movie," and it goes by the name Pokémon: The First Movie.
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25So sloppily made that it's barely coherent.
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25With its incomprehensible plot, flat visual style and indecipherably mixed messages (violence is good; no, wait, violence is bad!), this movie seems chiefly to be an excuse to sell even more trading cards.
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20This totally sucks.
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20Why do I keep having to see such awful movies?
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Pokémon isn't even good animation, unless the standard of measure is the crude LCD graphics of a Game Boy.
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13First the TV show, then the video games, the playing cards, the books, the clothes, and now the movie -- the dreaded movie.
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10There isn't a moment of wonder or poetry in its very long 69 minutes.
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10An unoriginal warming over of a skimpy Japanese production that has been re-edited, rescored and rewritten for American tots and padded out to feature length with a plotless short called "Pikachu's Vacation."
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0Possibly the most deranged, pointlessly complex, automatic-writing-like cultural manifestation outside the cosmologies of the more creative psychotics.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 14 out of 18
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Mixed: 3 out of 18
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Negative: 1 out of 18
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Elizebeth10
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Foolish, preposterous, a big wannabe tearjerker that probably is to the genuine Pokemon fans.
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7It is great for Pokemon fans and decent enough for some others to enjoy it. The story may come off as a surprise to some.