Pokemon the First Movie: Mewtwo Strikes Back

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.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

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.

Chicago Reader Lisa Alspector

By the time the fighting between clones and their originals turned to fraternal bonding, I was quite moved, even blissed out.

San Francisco Examiner Wesley Morris

The film is obviously a long-form episode of a show better digested in 22-minute segments.

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.

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."

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

A dismayingly impersonal piece of anime, genial yet chaotic.

San Francisco Chronicle Peter Stack

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.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

Essentially, the film functions as a holiday catalog, introducing fans to a new Pokemon whose effigy they can collect in trading cards.

USA Today Mike Clark

Plays a little like a pacifistic variation on Bruce Lee's "Enter the Dragon."

New York Post Hannah Brown

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.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

It's just a sound-and-light show, linked to the marketing push for Pokemon in general.

Chicago Tribune Marc Caro

The sense that the movie serves mostly to showcase a slew of purchasable cartoon figures loses nothing in the translation.

Variety Robert Koehler

Girls -- a big part of the Pokemon crowd and what makes it such a humongous commercial success -- will feel left out in the cold.

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?

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

There is a new definition of the term, "critic-proof movie," and it goes by the name Pokémon: The First Movie.

Baltimore Sun Ann Hornaday

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.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

So sloppily made that it's barely coherent.

TV Guide Steve Simels

This totally sucks.

TNT RoughCut Bill McLochlin

Why do I keep having to see such awful movies?

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.

Mr. Showbiz Larry Terenzi

First the TV show, then the video games, the playing cards, the books, the clothes, and now the movie -- the dreaded movie.

Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan

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."

Film.com Robert Horton

There isn't a moment of wonder or poetry in its very long 69 minutes.

Village Voice Michael Atkinson

Possibly the most deranged, pointlessly complex, automatic-writing-like cultural manifestation outside the cosmologies of the more creative psychotics.