| 75 |
Boston Globe
Besty Sherman
The 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.
|
| 75 |
New York Daily News
The 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.
|
| 70 |
Chicago Reader
By the time the fighting between clones and their originals turned to fraternal bonding, I was quite moved, even blissed out.
|
| 63 |
San Francisco Examiner
The film is obviously a long-form episode of a show better digested in 22-minute segments.
|
| 63 |
Miami Herald
Christine Dolen
What a mere adult reviewer has to say about this 70-minute film is probably irrelevant. Pokémon fans will see it -- and love it -- regardless.
|
| 60 |
The New York Times
Anita Gates
But the animation, with its rich colors and stylized angles, is fun to watch and at times does seem like a psychedelic "Sesame Street."
|
| 58 |
Entertainment Weekly
A dismayingly impersonal piece of anime, genial yet chaotic.
|
| 50 |
San Francisco Chronicle
It 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.
|
| 50 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
Essentially, the film functions as a holiday catalog, introducing fans to a new Pokemon whose effigy they can collect in trading cards.
|
| 50 |
USA Today
Plays a little like a pacifistic variation on Bruce Lee's "Enter the Dragon."
|
| 50 |
New York Post
Strictly 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.
|
| 50 |
Chicago Sun-Times
It's just a sound-and-light show, linked to the marketing push for Pokemon in general.
|
| 50 |
Chicago Tribune
Marc Caro
The sense that the movie serves mostly to showcase a slew of purchasable cartoon figures loses nothing in the translation.
|
| 50 |
Variety
Girls -- a big part of the Pokemon crowd and what makes it such a humongous commercial success -- will feel left out in the cold.
|
| 40 |
LA Weekly
Nicole Campos
Are 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?
|
| 30 |
Austin Chronicle
There is a new definition of the term, "critic-proof movie," and it goes by the name Pokémon: The First Movie.
|
| 25 |
Baltimore Sun
With 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.
|
| 25 |
Christian Science Monitor
So sloppily made that it's barely coherent.
|
| 20 |
TV Guide
This totally sucks.
|
| 20 |
TNT RoughCut
Bill McLochlin
Why do I keep having to see such awful movies?
|
| 20 |
Los Angeles Times
Robin Rauzi
Pokémon isn't even good animation, unless the standard of measure is the crude LCD graphics of a Game Boy.
|
| 13 |
Mr. Showbiz
First the TV show, then the video games, the playing cards, the books, the clothes, and now the movie -- the dreaded movie.
|
| 10 |
Washington Post
An 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."
|
| 10 |
Film.com
There isn't a moment of wonder or poetry in its very long 69 minutes.
|
| 0 |
Village Voice
Possibly the most deranged, pointlessly complex, automatic-writing-like cultural manifestation outside the cosmologies of the more creative psychotics.
|
