I checked on my post on the previous movie... how much things have changed, haha.
I did it way back in 2015 and I was talking about how I look fondly back on this franchise, but haven't been an active participant in various respects in several years.
That changed that fall when I bought a Nintendo 2DS, Pokémon Diamond and started watching the Diamond & Pearl series
Fast forward...
I'd been looking forward to revisiting this movie for a long time. I know several movies for this series have been released over the years. I think I may have seen 10 of them.
This one is easily my favorite, although when I get around to "Lucario and the Mystery of Mew" (which I saw bits of but never the full movie), that might change.
I have the most nostalgia for this movie. I love the music, the character arcs, the storyline. And I have fond memories of seeing it in the theater too. I had three groups of friends ask me to see it with them. I wound up seeing it with my friend Teresa because we hadn't seen each other since the school district put us in two different middle schools. I think it was last time we really got to hang out... we lost touch, sadly. We reconnected briefly on Facebook a couple of years ago, but her profile has since disappeared.
Up until my third year of college, that was the one moment in my life where I really felt popular, haha. Speaking as someone who's still painfully shy and with very few long-term friendships, that was a big deal.
One funny thing I realized today: this movie turned 20 this year! Duh! It's right in the name: 2000. And when it came out, I was turning 14. So there you go... I feel old, lol
Pikachu's Rescue Adventure
Like every movie, there's a mini-movie as an opening act that shows the adventures of Pikachu and the other Pokémon. Togepi wanders off and the others have to rescue it. As the name implies. :sigh: Between this and the previous movie, I can't help but think that Togepi was only created as a plot device. In the Orange Islands series, it was a deus ex machina- using its Metronome to resolve situations that could have otherwise gone terribly wrong. There's not much story to this- once they find Togepi, the other Pokémon explore the new area and meet lots of new Pokémon species we hadn't seen before. They'd go on to make their appearances in the upcoming Johto series.
One highlight is the musical number led by Bellossom. It's so freaking cute! And it's great that they included it in the soundtrack too. My only nitpick-- they have Poliwag saying "Poliwhirl" and a Poliwhirl saying "Poliwrath"... what is with these movies having these errors? They're all made by the same people as the series.
And there's also a funny running gag with Meowth from Team Rocket running into all kinds of bad luck. By the end, he's like "I'm not going to summer camp ever again." He just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time... a lot!
The Main Attraction
OMG... where do I begin?
Well- the story goes something like this:
The balance of nature is being disrupted because this one guy wants to "collect" the legendary birds. He's not even using Pokéballs! He's using evil technology to put them in cages. All to have the most legendary collection in the world. In the movie, they don't even give him a name. I think it's Lawrence III or something like that. But he's some random jerk that doesn't have any clue what consequences his conquest has.
No joke- he said- "My collection began with a Mew card and now all this..." and we got this Mew card with the movie ticket. I think I still have it somewhere.
The movie takes place in the final third of the Orange Islands story arc where Ash and Misty have Tracy as their new travel companion. The villian catching Moltres triggers a storm that brings them to Shamouti Island. They have a local legend involving the trio of islands: fire, ice and lightning. And a chosen one has to retrieve orbs representing the three birds from these islands and bring them back to the Shamouti shrine. According to legend, this ritual brought peace to the clashing titans and the beast of the sea.
Ash becomes this chosen one and thanks to that one guy, the world is actually in trouble and Ash winds up saving the world for real.
Straight away... I love this whole concept. The quest involving Articuno, Zapdos and Moltres, but the fact Ash is given this huge prophecy to fulfill... I gathered very early on when I was beginning the series in 1998 that he was someone special. The fact he puts the welfare of Pikachu and Pokémon in general above his own- that was huge. And he always viewed them as his friends and partners.
I have vague memories of being on the Internet during this time and hearing rumors about Ash getting his first kiss in this movie. That certainly caught my attention and when I saw the screenshots, my first reaction was "I gotta find out who she is..."
I kinda joke now that Misty spent half of the movie in a foul mood because she wasn't the one who kissed him first. To put it mildly, I still have mixed feelings about the idea of Ash and Misty being a couple. (I swear, if I went into this further, it'd be a whole dissertation...this blog isn't exactly the right place for that) But with this movie, I was intrigued about her feelings for him being thrust into the forefront.
The girl who was Ash's first kiss-- her name was Melody. And the moment she was introduced, I loved her. She was very sassy and showed through the movie to be very strong and innovative. It was her first year playing the role of the "festival maiden" in the festival. She plays a song on an ocarina and tells the chosen one the prophecy he needs to fulfill. She's very cynical about these old stuffy traditions, but obviously, a believer gets made of her.
After watching the movie again recently, I wanted to give mad props to her voice actress. I was about to credit Lisa Ortiz, but after doing the research, I found it was actually Amy Birnbaum... I think I wanted to credit Lisa because I recently saw as Korrina the Shalour gym leader in X&Y and I LOVED her story arc mastering Mega Evolution with Lucario. And would go on to say how that adoration originated all the way back when. Not quite. Amy, I know specifically for being Tea in Yu-Gi-Oh!
But yeah, Melody is awesome.
Team Rocket is up to their usual shenangians, trying to get Pikachu. But they're good for a lot of comic relief and actually help Ash save the world toward the end of the movie. They even made up a new motto to commerate the occasion :P
The icing on the cake is the 4th wall break at the end of the movie where they bemoan the fact nobody saw that they were heroes and Slowking, another new Pokémon introduced in this movie, points to the audience, saying that they saw what they did.
Another thing I noticed watching this again... Tracy is the new travel companion while Brock is staying with Professor Ivy. I don't think he has more than a dozen lines in this movie. And most of them are just filler commentary. People say how he's the most forgettable travel companion Ash has ever had. I never forgot Tracy because I look back very fondly on the first three seasons of the series- Indigo, Orange and Johto. Brock had a cameo with no lines in this movie and he still made a bigger impression than Tracy did.
His most memorable line was a comment tacked at the end of Misty and Melody having another fight about her feelings for Ash: "He's a boy and he's a friend, but he's not my boyfriend!" and he jogs up to them, asking "Are you talking about me?"... haha... it's funny to me because I actually paired him and Misty together back when I was writing fanfiction. I don't think I got the idea from this movie, but it still happened. And it also wasn't the only thing from this movie I wound up incorporating into my work.
I heard Lugia mentioned by name by one of my friends a while before this movie came out. It wound up being the beast of the sea from this legend and the leader of this legendary bird trio. Its call sounds like a humpback whale singing and it's heard throughout the movie. But that big reveal at the midpoint... WOW!... It's the most majestic Pokémon I'd ever seen. And that's still true.
The crazy part is that I made Lugia my plot device in my fanfiction series... before I even knew what it looked like. So this reveal meant a lot to me personally and I was not disappointed.
The biggest payoff, after all of the hardships Ash had to go through to to fulfill this prophecy, is Lugia's song being playing by Melody on her ocarina and it becomes this huge sweeping orchestral piece. And Ash takes a victory "flight" on Lugia's back with the other legendary birds. That piece still gives me goosebumps to this day.
Then there's an embarassing but heartfelt moment that kinda puts things in perspective. We see Ash's mom (another reveal in this movie- her first name: Delia) and Professor Oak throughout the movie trying to make sense of the erractic weather patterns being caused by the disturbance in the Orange Islands. She kinda gives Ash a hard time for making her worry about him. She also asks him to try saving the world closer to home next time... I don't know how far the production into the 3rd movie was by this point, but that's what winds up happening. Maybe not the fate of the world thing, but the storyline involves Ash's mom getting kidnapped and he has to rescue her.
So much of this movie influenced me so much. When I found out Lugia was going to be in the next games, I knew I had to use one on my team. It was disappointing that it didn't learn any Psychic moves by level up, but it felt like the holy grail to me at the time. Years later, the one that brought me back to the games was Lucario. All because of bits and pieces that I saw of that other movie.
And the whole chosen one thing... a lot of things I was exposed to at the time influenced my first original work of fiction and I'm currently working on the origin story of it. But at its center was a chosen one who wielded power nobody else had and he was the one thing standing between the villain and the destruction of the world.
But on the other side of that, I got SO sick of hearing about other chosen ones in other movies and series. I was okay when Luna said it to Serena in Sailor Moon. But there was one more time after that in some movie... where someone was told "you're the chosen one," I lost my mind. I know it wasn't a new concept by the time it came to Ash, but to me, he'll always be THE chosen one.
The soundtrack
I'll have to revisit this as well.
Like with the previous movie, the soundtrack featured a lot of current artists, but very few songs that were actually relevant to the movie. I think the soundtracks said they featured music that appeared in or were inspired by the movie. In the movie itself, I think we only heard the Rescue theme song, the Bellossom number, Lugia's song and the three songs featured in the end credits.
There were a few songs about parents not understanding the whole Pokémon phenomenon. One of them was the first time a lot of fans came across Dream Street- who re-recorded "They Don't Understand" for their album. My friend Dana found out about them through this song. She babysat for someone who liked watching this movie and a performance of this song by them was on the DVD.
I actually bought this CD after they broke up... one of many purchases I made as I struggled through that mourning period. And through it, I found another artist to buy music from. Plus One, a Christian boyband, did this song "With All Your Heart" on the soundtrack. I went on to buy 2 albums from them. I didn't know that their thing was Christian music until doing so, but it was one of those interesting random paths my album collection had taken over the years.
Weird Al did his own Pokérap, but it's called "Polkamon"... that's actually a really fun song, haha. I kinda wish they made a music video for it cuz I can actually imagine how it'd go down. There's this huge party that breaks out at Professor Oak's lab and Ash stumbles into it, totally confused and Misty's dancing with a Tentacruel. Yeah, crazy stuff, but it'd be hilarious.
And there were a LOT of songs about not giving up, reaching for your dreams and the whole "power of one" concept. It's really good advice, especially for kids and teenagers. So I can't really hate on any of that.
One interesting inclusion indicative of that time-- O-Town had 2 songs. I don't know why I never watched "Making the Band" because I wound up watching "American Idol" and becoming a mega-fan of that series. But that was a big deal back then. Then after they did one album, they broke up.
Speaking of "American Idol," another song on the soundtrack was "Flying without Wings" by Westlife. And the one thing that made me angrier than the fact Clay Aiken didn't win American Idol, Ruben's winning song was "Flying without wings"... and they tried to pass it off like it was a brand new song. It's not!
I think I tried to look up Westlife on the Internet way back in the early 2000's because I liked this song so much, but the only websites I could find were inundated with pop-ads. Ok, Wikipedia explains a few things... Simon Cowell signed them, and apparently said they had to fire some of the guys cuz they were ugly... but that explains how that song got rehashed for Ruben. I'm still not happy about that whole situation.
And apparently Westlife is the 8th top selling boyband of all time, so that's pretty impressive.
Two interesting inclusions came from vintage acts. Donna Summer did "The Power of One," which is a pretty cliche but moving ballad.
And the B-52's did their own version of the prophecy in song form. I think I heard this before I'd even heard "Love Shack"... but I freaking love that the prophecy got made into a song and they do a great job.
Disturb not the harmony of fire, ice or lightning
Lest these titans wreck destruction upon the world in which they clash
Although the water's guardian shall arise to quell the fighting,
Alone, its song will fail. Thus the Earth shall turn to Ash
Oh, Chosen One, into thine hands bring together all three
Their treasures combined tame the beast of the sea
From the trio of islands, ancient spheres shall you take
For between life and death, all the difference you will make
You must climb to the shrine to write what it wrong
And the world will be healed by the guardian's song
Yep, even after all these years, I still rememeber it so much. I gotta give a lot of credit to that song, but it goes to show how deep my love for this movie goes.
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