Erupt: Detective Pikachu — Not a Script Tease
One does not simply say they don’t want their own Pikachu sitting on their shoulder. Let alone a Pikachu with impeccable detective skills. But with all the childhood dreams come true, we must certainly look at Pokemon Detective Pikachu in a logical manner, right through our joyful tears when our beloved pocket monsters come to life on the big screen.
If Detective Pikachu got anything right, it’s the CGI rendering of the iconic animated Pokémon that we have all grown to cherish. That isn’t an easy task, considering the cases where it didn’t turn out right like a certain speedy relative of his.
However, the representation of our beloved Pokémon isn’t limited to visual effects, but extends to their mannerisms and accurately depicting how they’d affect the world around them. Detective Pikachu’s performance in this respect however, is definitely up for debate.
The film revolves around Ryme city, a place where humans and Pokémon coexist as equals, and the “outdated” concept of Pokémon battles is nowhere to be found, save for an encounter at a Battle Arena. This idea in itself starts trouble for the realism in Detective Pikachu since it effectively loses the spark that the rest of the franchise has held, the spark that we expected this film to exploit.
While it does manage to hit the crowd with occasional nostalgia through not-very-subtle fan service, it’s successful in making the experience seem real in neither the Pokémon world nor our own.
When we observe the evolution of Pokemon (here, evolution is referring to evolving by natural selection and not the evolution to the next tier of the Pokemon), we learn that these pocket monsters have evolved to adapt to their natural climate and environment.
Taking the example of Geodudes and Golems, primarily found in caves, they have developed a natural camouflage in order to lure their prey close enough for them to eat them for survival. Forcing these animals to live in an urban population can be detrimental to the life of the Geodudes. This can also be observed in real life where domesticated dogs took on a completely different path when compared to wild dogs, becoming urban dogs and wolves respectively.
Even in the Pokemon games, some of the Pokemon are adapted to the urban environment like Magnetites, Pidgeys, Chanseys, Trubbish, and Muks. We all found it humorous when a Snorlax was sleeping on our way, but never thought about the repercussions it can have in cities.
As we can see, these examples of the realism in the Pokémon games managed to maintain the essence and charm of the game itself without making the experience stale or purely fantastical. But to say Detective Pikachu didn’t do any part of the realism correctly would be far from the truth.
The representation of an alliance between Pokémon and humans seems accurate when we look at the way they combine efforts to make the world a better place, like the Squirtles helping humans fight fires, even the Machamp redirecting traffic with multiple hands which offered both comedic effect and realism, since it showed Pokémon more suited than humans for a particular job adapting to it for the betterment of society.
The older Pokémon movies worked with much poorer production and thus remained jewels of life to be witnessed only by the ones who were already invested in the series. Detective Pikachu sets a standard for CGI Pokémon films, and while it still pales in comparison to our childhood experience of Pokémon, it definitely takes a step forward in the right direction, aptly summed in the words of Professor Oak…
“A Warm Welcome to the World of Pokémon!”
This article was written in collaboration with Sabharinathan, Antony Terence and Abhishek Ramachandran.
