Pokémon: The Arceus Chronicles (2022)
There's a line, even in a franchise built on monsters shooting lightning from their cheeks and evolving via friendship. Pokémon: The Arceus Chronicles vaults clean over it, lands on the other side, and seems perfectly happy about the whole thing.
I came to this with reasonable expectations. I wasn't after Ingmar Bergman. I just wanted a proper Pokémon adventure with a bit of energy and a story that holds together. What I got was something closer to a Tuesday afternoon TV episode that someone had decided to stretch, for reasons best known to themselves, to feature length. The seams show almost immediately.
The most baffling creative choice, and there are a few, is what the film does with Brock. Here is a character we grew up with. Steadfast, dependable, beloved. The Brock of the original Indigo League days was grounded in a way the wider series often wasn't. So naturally, the solution here is to reintroduce him as a shirtless, rocket-ship-flying Pokémon doctor. I sat with that for a while. I turned it over. I cannot make it make sense. It strips away whatever last shred of internal logic the series was still hanging onto, and it does so with a cheerful indifference that I found genuinely baffling.
The story itself is one-note in a way that becomes exhausting. There's a sequence involving an erupting Heatran that goes on for an absolute age. It just keeps going. The pacing around it is sluggish, the stakes never feel earned, and the plot keeps treading water in circles rather than building toward anything that feels like a payoff. A tightly structured adventure this is not. It meanders, stalls, and then meanders a bit more for good measure.
To be fair, the animation does its job well enough. The voice acting hits the familiar beats without stumbling. It looks and sounds exactly like the television series, which is probably the point, but that's also the problem. When everything on screen is indistinguishable from what you could watch for free on a Saturday morning, you're left wondering what the feature-length format is actually adding. Pretty colours and competent delivery can only carry so much weight. When the script underneath is this thin from a storytelling standpoint, no amount of flashy, if repetitive, animation disguises the fact that there's no real meat on the bone.
I don't think this is cynically made. I think it's a piece of franchise product aimed squarely at very young children who simply want more Pokémon, and on that narrow terms it's probably harmless enough. They'll enjoy it fine. But for anyone expecting a proper film, something with a bit of shape and ambition and a reason to exist beyond brand recognition, it's a deeply underwhelming experience. Asada and Tomiyasu have delivered something that coasts, and coasting is about the worst thing a Pokémon film can do given the sheer imaginative potential sitting right there in the source material.
Two stars. It's not offensive. It's just a bit of a mess, and a forgettable one at that.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2022 | Watched: 2026-07-13
