Pokémon the Movie: I Choose You! (2017)

Pokémon the Movie: I Choose You! arrives as the twentieth entry in a franchise that has outlived several generations of its own audience. Directed by Kunihiko Yuyama, it retells the opening beats of the original anime. Ash Ketchum oversleeps, loses the three starter Pokémon, receives a truculent Pikachu, and eventually earns the creature's loyalty during a Spearow attack. A Rainbow Wing from Ho-Oh sends him toward Mount Tensei with two new companions, Verity and Sorrel, and a brooding rival named Cross. The film is a nostalgia engine. It exists to make adults remember 1997 and to sell plush toys in 2017. That is not a crime. It is simply the business model.

The film has no interest in the cultural flashpoints that define the 2020s. Its conflicts are personal and mythical. Verity is a capable trainer, but the screenplay never turns her into a gender-politics case study. Race, sexuality, class, climate, body image, and neurodiversity do not enter the frame. The only history being revised is Pokémon's own fictional continuity. The emotional beats concern friendship, loss, and the bond between a boy and his electric mouse. Those are humanist gestures, not a lecture. The closest thing to a sermon is the lesson that abandoning a Charmander in the rain is poor form. That lesson predates the modern culture war by two decades.

Critically, the film was received poorly, with a 33 percent approval rating and complaints from longtime fans about the absence of Misty and Brock. It performed well in Japan and modestly elsewhere. Its legacy is a sequel and a reminder that Pokémon will continue to reboot itself whenever the merchandise cycle demands it. There is no ideological program here. There is only Pikachu, Ho-Oh, and a Rainbow Wing. The sommelier finds no notes of social justice. The bottle is corked with nostalgia.