POKÉMON MOVIE REVIEW: THE ZOROARK MOVIE

Wait, one more Diamond & Pearl movie! We had the whole trilogy, and then there's another movie, but it's not the fourth movie, it has nothing to do with the trilogy, not that the trilogy movies had much to do with each other anyway, but this movie has nothing to do with any of them, even though it's the fourth... ok.

Zoroark: Master of Illusions, which is short for Pocket Monsters Diamond & Pearl the Movie - Supreme Ruler of Illusions: Zoroark (you can say that three times fast — actually no, you can't), is the thirteenth Pokémon movie and yeah, it's the awkward one in between Generations 4 and 5 and in between a barely stringed together trilogy and... uh... dual movie shenanigans...

Considered the situation, we were... ...cautious about this Zoroark movie. But it turns out that... we liked it. Which surprised us. After all, we don't give half a damn about Zoroark, the furry bait that was manufactured to succeed Lucario, but never became as popular. There are plenty of Pokémon that ended up being popular with the furries, before and after Lucario itself, but Zoroark isn't one of them, even though it has the premise of being a shapeshifter... It just never caught on. Maybe Game Freak was trying too hard. Also, furries generally don't really want a furry creature to shapeshift into human form. They want them to stay furry, of course!

We also can complain that Zoroark's design just has too much going on. It's a kitsune and a kabuki actor and a paintbrush and a shapeshifting female temptress, but not really any of these things really. It's so non-committal about everything. And this Zoroark is primarily in the role of being a mother, and the concept of a milf hadn't really taken hold of the zeitgeist yet...

But even though this movie is called Zoroark and the Zoroark of Zoroark, Zoroark itself has an extremely minor role actually. The one journalist dude whose name we don't remember had more of a role than Zoroark. This title reveal was just part of trying hard to make Zoroark into a thing, which didn't happen. Yet, the main character of this movie is firmly Zorua, the unevolved form of Zoroark. The one in this movie is the child of the titular Zoroark and is questing to save its mother. The narrative follows Zorua, and Zoroark is kind of a background presence or even a plot device.

And speaking of plot, this movie sure has one. And a challenge mode plot, no less. It had to incorporate a bunch of bullshit, but still be a movie. Because, see, this was a weird time in the Pokémon video game series. It was still the era of Diamond & Pearl's generation 4, yet the latest games were the generation 2 remakes Heart Gold & Soul Silver, and generation 5 was on the horizon with Black & White, which were complete reboots. By what we can presume was some kind of corporate mandate, this movie was ordered to somehow promote all of these games and their stupid events at the same time:

• This movie still follows the anime storyline for Diamond & Pearl and therefore still has Dawn and Piplup and even the last lingering ghost of Brock.

• But it also has to tie in with an event for Heart Gold & Soul Silver in which people could obtain the shiny legendary beasts at their local Gamestop. That's why the shiny legendary beasts are in this movie.

• 

  And it also has to tie in with events distributing Celebi, which is why Celebi is in this movie also. You could get an event Celebi for Heart Gold & Soul Silver which could later be migrated to Black & White to unlock Zorua. Talk about an insane event chain. In Japan, one of these distribution events was during the showing of the movie at the theater. Which we imagine must have been as close to experiencing hell on earth as possible. A movie theater packed with overexcited kids, the glow of a hundred DSes in the darkness, the scattered shouts of I GOT CELEBI! and MOMMY WHY DOESN'T IT WORK and MOM! SHE HIT ME! and HE DESERVED IT FOR GETTING CELEBI FIRST, and the movie on the giant screen continues unwatched and forgotten in the background. Man, now that we're writing this fanfiction, we feel like we were there too.

• Oh, and let's not forget, the movie needs to tease the then-upcoming games, Black & White, and that's why it features Zorua as the main character and Zoroark in the title.

But faced with this promotion-based writing prompt obstacle course, the resulting plot of the movie is somehow... coherent. In fact, it's more than coherent: it has a very creative plot, one of the most creative of all these Pokémon movies. The worst part of this movie is indeed that all these Pokémon are obviously shoehorned in for the aforementioned promotions, but the writers found a way to give each of them at least half an excuse for their presence. Nice job.

Plot summary

Twenty years ago, some asshole punched a sweet fairy (Celebi) and took the energy of the future all for himself. This gave him visions of the future, which he used to buy stocks and undertake capitalist ventures. But he only took twenty years worth of future energy, which are now about to expire. So now he needs to find the sweet fairy again, and punch it a second time. He will achieve this with sports fraud, animal abuse, and fake terrorism. He must be stopped. What kind of person punches a sweet fairy?

Absolutely nuts plot. We had never heard of anything like this before. But intriguing. And bafflingly coherent. For one thing, it's cool that the rich guy — his name is Kodai by the way — gets visions, but rather than using them for mystical stuff or grand goals or to make himself king, he just makes a lot of money at the stock market. That makes perfect sense, and we can't think of another story in which this is a primary plotpoint. And we certainly weren't expecting a Pokémon movie, the thirteenth Pokémon movie, The Zoroark of the Zoroark, to be the one that goes there.

It sounds like Kodai did a Lawrence III twenty years ago, and studied archaeology and mystical bullshit, and learned that this was the way to get superpowers that would let him see the future, and even knew that this would have horrible consequences. But he did it back then, and now he wants an encore.

Kodai's demise flows like a Greek tragedy. During the plot of the movie, the use of his powers are all completely focused on not losing his powers. He's not actually using his powers to use them anymore, he's wasting all this energy and his precious last chances to use his power on trying to prevent his fate of losing his visions, thereby causing his fate. If he just accepted that his powers would only last twenty years and simply used them fully in that time, he could have just made his fortune and then retired as an accomplished rich asshole and be done. But he wrapped up his whole persona into being the rich asshole who has visions and is always one step ahead, and he couldn't let that go.

Celebi

This is the second time that Celebi is in a major role in a Pokémon movie. Lucky sweet fairy. But this time around, its role is different. In the fourth movie, Celebi's main ability was time-travel, but the villain coveted its ... basket-weaving powers. In this movie, Celebi's power is making nature flourish, but the villain covets its incidental time-distorting powers.

We say Kodai punched a fairy to get his powers, but, more precisely, he extracted his powers from a Time Ripple, which is the portal that Celebi uses to travel through time. When Kodai touched the Time Ripple, this hurt Celebi and also caused all plant life in a large radius to die out and not grow back for many years.

But what did Kodai extract from the Time Ripple? And why did that kill the plants? And how is this connected to Celebi's usual function of flying around making the plants grow and the flowers bloom and the fruit ripen?

The movie does not spell this out, but we think the implication is Celebi's power of time and of boosting nature are actually connected. The energy of nature is actually specifically from the passing of time. The plant needs to gather time in order to grow - time is the energy that makes the flowers bloom and the fruits ripen. And so Celebi arrives to bestow time on the plants and make them flourish now, without them needing to wait any longer.

The Time Ripple is Celebi's access point to the power of time, letting Celebi draw from all the infinity of the future. When Kodai took some power from the Time Ripple, he stole the future from the plants, which is why he could see the future, and why the plants died and could not grow back until the time he stole ran out.

This is such a weird concept that nevertheless makes so much weird sense.

The plan

So, Kodai's power is running out, and he is desperate to find the Time Ripple again, so that he can steal more power from it and keep having his visions of the future. Kodai even knows that this will cause all the plants that finally started to recover to die yet again, but he doesn't care. He only cares about his own ego. And stonks!

With his weakening power, Kodai occasionally has visions about his schemes to find the Time Ripple again. It seems that he is completely devoting himself to this singular cause, and therefore he's not having any visions of anything else. Which makes sense. If he's completely devoted to one cause, that will be the only thing he'd be doing in the future that he could potentially have a vision about. He can see his future, but his choices in the present are what makes his future.

In one of his visions, Kodai sees himself with Celebi and the Time Ripple, and they are next to a weird clock thing that for some reason just says 1. He has these visions for a long time, and has no idea what this weird clock thing is, until the Pokémon Baccer World Cup comes to town, and they install countdown clocks counting the number of days until the World Cup. To all the folks in places where soccer is not such a big deal, this is something that has happened in wealthier times in countries hosting soccer tournaments. More often, these kind of clocks would roll to counting the hours and the minutes when the time is approaching, but in this movie, these clocks stupidly say 1 for the entire eve of the event. Kodai probably reflexively hisses at these clocks for the whole year before this Time Ripple thing.

That's right, the Pokémon Baccer World Cup. It's a sport with Pokémon, kind of like a mash of soccer and basketball, and involving robot targets. It is played with a human coach shouting orders at their team of three Pokémon, who do essentially ball tricks. So, more like a circus than a sport. But how impressive is it to see Pokémon once again doing things that are in their natural realm of ability, as we said other times that the Pokémon anime tackled the idea of a Pokémon circus? Also, since this sport is played with two teams, three on three, isn't this kinda just a different take on a three-on-three Pokémon battle yet again, but instead of aiming to hit each other, they're aiming at the target? Though, they're also free to hit each other to prevent the other team from scoring, so... Either case, are the Pokémon players paid? Human athletes get paid a lot for the toll that the sport takes on their bodies. Or does the prize money go to their human coach, who just stands there barking orders? Why are the humans always just barking orders to their Pokémon? Why is this cool? Actually yeah, do humans in the Pokémon world do anything except yell at animals, or be excited to watch other people yell at animals?

Anyway, in that vision with Celebi and the countdown clock for the World Cup, Kodai also sees that Suicune, Entei, and Raikou would be there. So he joins the Baccer World Cup as the coach of a team of legendary beasts to follow what he saw in his vision and allow for the future in which they're there. And, by the way, the beasts are revered as the protector deities of this town, so he's doing something like, building a soccer team with the Archangel Michael, the Lion of Saint Mark, and Saint Francis of Assisi. Sacrilegious, yet intriguing, yet hilarious.

To assemble this dream team, Kodai bypasses the problem of finding and catching and controlling the legendary beasts by just having them as holograms. Holograms can't play Pokémon Baccer, of course, but it doesn't matter that they're not real, because he plans to punch Celebi again the day before the tournament, and he'll figure out how to get out of his lie after he renews his vision power, since he assumes his next vision will guide him about what to do next.

Which raises the question for us of, how did he even get into the sport finals if he doesn't actually have a team? Maybe he's just big enough of a rich asshole that he could simply buy his way in with a team of the host city's local guardians as a publicity stunt? Or, since Ash and co. mention that Pokémon Baccer is a brand new sport, maybe this first tournament can be a little bit non-standard with some rich guy jumping in late?

So yeah, Kodai's big plan involves sports fraud. But wait, it gets worse. In his vision he also saw Zoroark, the Pokémon of illusions who can turn into anything. So he puts two and two together, and kidnaps a Zoroark, and threatens her baby Zorua as leverage to force Zoroark to do his bidding.

This is the animal abuse part of his plan. Zoroark must use its illusion powers to impersonate the legendary beasts going on a rampage through the town. All of this is an illusion, and the destruction is also illusory, but the goal of this stunt is to record footage of what appears to be the legendary beasts destroying the town, so that Kodai can make an urgent news report and instruct the town to evacuate. He even added special extra effects and stock footage of fire booms to make the video extra spicy.

Kodai appears in the news report to give a corporate apology, and he's so sorry that his Pokémon are doing this, but they've come under the evil influence of Zoroark the Zoroark of Zoroark, so everyone must leave town while I will recapture my own Pokémon, the big dangerous Legendary Beasts, and I am very sorry.

His premeditated plan involves fake terrorism, creating an artificial scandal around himself, in which it seems like his Pokémon are out of control. Surely his next visions will help him repair his public image, and he'll worry about that later.

While everyone is evacuated, the town will be empty, making the rest of the movie easier to animate, and giving Kodai the privacy he wants to freely search for the countdown clock that he saw in his vision, which is where he needs to find Celebi again. There are like twenty clocks like that in town and he wants to make sure he's the very first person to get to it so that no one else steals his time vision powers. As if someone else in this town would punch a sweet fairy.

What a hell of a contrived plan. It makes somewhat sense, but there's about a thousand simpler versions of this plan that he could have thought of and done instead. He didn't really need the town to be evacuated; he could have just gone to each clock as a publicity stunt and scanned for the Time Ripple on the down-low. Or, if he didn't feel comfortable not having complete privacy, couldn't he have just said a gas main broke or something and evacuated the city that way? Why did it need to look like the Legendary Beasts on a rampage, and make everyone think that Zoroark has made the city's guardians turn against them? Well, there are two reasons for this, really. The out-of-universe one is, they had to shoehorn in these Pokémon because of the aforementioned promotional reasons. The in-universe one might be, because he's following what he saw in the vision, he is locking onto the future that is shown in his vision, even though there are lots of other possibilities. But he's not thinking of any of them, because the vision with him with the Time Ripple included this weirdness, and he's got to make the weirdness true somehow for that future to materialize.

Another thing Kodai sees in his visions is that his secretary is going to betray him. So, why does he leave her alone with all of his computers and do absolutely nothing to stop her whatsoever? Just to allow for his vision to become true. And then when she shows up with the twerps later, he just says, "I knew it!" like he used some amazing power of deduction, when actually, he's the guy who has visions, what sort of prize does he want?

The secretary, by the way, was really cool for a few minutes, hacking computers in a somewhat realistic way: by opening every folder before finally finding the password-protected folder, and simply guessing the weak password on the first shot. Then she had the scene where she let down her hair for the sole purpose of being like, Why yes I am a spy~ ...to the one person who already knows she's a spy. Lol, she just wanted to do that scene and bungled the moment. She also freed the twerps from Kodai's cage, but beyond that, she really didn't do much in this movie.

The town

By the way, this town, what is it? Apparently, this movie is based on Amsterdam and parts of Belgium. Now, we have never been there, but we would have never guessed, because the city is shown to be hilly and nestled against a mountain range.

Elevation. In the Netherlands. That's kind of the one thing that they don't have. Why do you think they are called the Nether Lands. Maybe it just looked too weird to the Japanese animators to not have a mountain always in sight. To be fair, to someone who is not used to that, a flat expanse like that can be pretty distressing. It triggers all the ancestral small prey animal instincts.

One thing we didn't already know, but looked into during the making of this article, is that trees are very important to the culture of Amsterdam. It's estimated that there are a million trees within the city (which is kinda a lot compared to, say, the 95,000 estimated trees within Paris - there's a 1:22 ratio of trees to human residents in Paris, but a 1:3 ratio of trees to human residents in Amsterdam!). There are records of trees being planted in Amsterdam dating back to 1340, and a law from 1454 said if you harmed a tree, your hand would be cut off. Fuck yeah, tree law!

Unfortunately, many of Amsterdam's trees were destroyed during World War II, and, in possibly the most tragic way, during the famine and harsh winter near the end of the war. The people that cared so much for their trees had to chop branches and fell whole trees in desperation to survive the cold and starvation. Man. Only 25,000 trees survived the war, but Amsterdam has helped its trees recover in the time since then.

So it makes sense that this movie captures the vibe that the people in this city care so much for the trees that were so tragically destroyed in the past.

Zorua and everybody else

In the meanwhile that Kodai's insane plan is progressing, Zorua has escaped from its cage and is searching for its mom. Along the way, Zorua teams up with the twerps, and they also wind up meeting Celebi. Elsewhere, the real (shiny) legendary beasts sense that they've been slandered and that the town is in danger, and so they all depart from the scenic wildernesses to start running towards the town. All the different promotional Pokémon are converging.

Zorua is one of them talking Pokémon, although, once again, we're really not sure why. At this point in the series, it looks like the worldbuilding is: any movie-featured Pokémon can have telepathy, and don't even think about why anymore. Shut up. Its mother Zoroark cannot talk, even though it is in the title of the movie - more proof that she's not actually the featured Pokémon here. Why can only Zorua talk, but not its mother? Where did it even learn? It's never stated outright, but Zorua describes its ability to speak in a way that makes it sound like a special ability that is unique to itself, and that, and if there are other Zorua or Zoroark, they cannot talk either. We think it is a really strange plot choice for Zorua to speak, but for Zoroark to be completely unable to speak. If we were in charge of this movie, we would have kept Zoroark growling and snarling at Kodai because it's fine if she has nothing she wants to say to him, but it would be nice if, at the end, she could have said "Thank you" to the twerps, even just for the sole purpose of confirming that she can also speak if she wanted.

Zorua's personality is that of the spunky little kid who is, however, also tearfully looking for its mommy. Played straight, but checks out. Like Zoroark, it also has the power of shapeshifting, which it uses mostly for mischief. It can transform into other Pokémon and also into people, but its transformation power isn't perfect yet. Like Duplica's Ditto who consistently failed to transform its face, Zorua often forgets to include its fluffy tail in the transformation. It also often smirks, even when transformed as a sweet fairy like Celebi, which ruins the illusion. Though, Celebi seems to be intrigued by its sneakier double. Kinky. It invites Zorua to its private tree, and maybe…

But Celebi does not consent to being strangled by random strange rich assholes. This is not the sort of night it had in mind. Man, that was actually kinda hard to watch. This is the second time that Celebi is in a featured role, and the second time that Celebi is wrangled by giant man hands. Why does this keep happening?!

In this case, Kodai had previously had a vision that he would have an important vision while wrangling Celebi, so that's why he sought out Celebi specifically to wrangle the vision out of it. Zorua, Pikachu, and Piplup manage to save Celebi, although it spends the rest of the movie gravely injured, in a cute little cast.

Because of this injury, Celebi desperately needs the Time Ripple to heal itself. So Kodai is searching for the Time Ripple, and now the twerps have to try to find it too.

Whenever a plot has the protagonists and the antagonists searching for the same McGuffin, there is always the danger that the villain will let the heroes use their Main Character Powers to do the hard work of advancing the plot, which the villain can piggyback along and then jump straight to the ending and get the McGuffin first.

Yet, the twerps realize that Kodai is watching them, and this is not their first movie, so they have some countermeasures to thwart Kodai…

The ending

So, the twerps are rushing to get the injured Celebi to the Time Ripple. In the meanwhile, the real shiny legendary beasts have arrived at the town and are attacking Zoroark, who they perceive as both the one who has threatened the town under their protection and the one who has directly slandered them. The twerps have to simultaneously protect Celebi, stop Kodai, help Zorua, find the Time Ripple first, and convince the beasts that Zoroark is not the villain of this movie.

Amid the confusion, Celebi must flee, and flies weakly off into the forest. Kodai sees the opportunity and chases after Celebi until he grabs it again... but realizes that he's holding Zorua, who managed to do a perfect transformation. This trick was a team effort between Zorua, and the journalist's Bronzor, who used its Psychic powers to make the transformed-Zorua appear to fly like Celebi. Clever move, and now the real Celebi has been carried far away in the opposite direction, and Kodai is left holding Zorua, which is of no value to him. Yet, he throws Zorua to the ground, and it yelps, and Zoroark's telepathic mommy powers activate, which bring her to the scene of the final confrontation.

There's a bunch of fighting, but the important thing that happens is that Zoroark has a pretty brilliant idea. Nobody said that her illusion powers have to be limited to promotional reasons. So she invents this whole illusion that Kodai succeeded, and found the Time Ripple, and renewed his vision powers while the plants all withered. He escaped to his airship of overcompensation while gloating about how, that's right, he got the Time Ripple now just as he'd gotten it last time, and fooled everyone, and now he'll do more scams and more evil. And Zoroark cancels the illusion at the most climactic moment, and Kodai is revealed to have actually been standing not on his airship, but on the steps to the stadium, where he's been being filmed and broadcast live as he unknowingly confessed to all of his evil schemes. A juicy retribution for the man who owned all the mainstream media — he got televised admitting to his crimes and everyone saw it on the TV, on the channels that he (previously) owned.

Kodai got what he deserved through causing his own downfall, and the poetic justice is delicious. The Pokémon movie writers did seem to learn from the previous movies not to senselessly beat down the villain at the end.

Though they didn't learn not to have the (allegedly) featured Pokémon die at the end, just to grieve it for five minutes and then, lol, nevermind, it's not dead. Zoroark didn't actually die. Nobody even really believed that this was a possibility. That was just a waste of time.

And in the end, the Team Rocket trio, who had a very minor role so far, get their shining moment. They muse, hey, what was up with all of that, anyway? All this vision nonsense, and was this any good for him? It sounds like life would be so boring if you always knew what was going on. Maybe it's better to be there for the ride and enjoy the surprises! This feels good!

This harkens back to the endings of several of the earlier movies, where Team Rocket delivers a good thought, a positive answer to the themes of the movie, right at the very ending. It happened in the first four movies, but then stopped. This movie brings this convention back, which lets Team Rocket have an important moment in a movie where they otherwise didn't get to do very much. They get to be the Greek chorus, making the important observation after the ending of the Greek tragedy.

In conclusion

As we said, we are intrigued by the plot concept of this movie, and the execution isn't half-bad, although definitely bogged down by the promotional shenanigans that it had to submit to. In particular, the legendary beasts are the least developed and the most superfluous. The destruction could have simply been done by Zoroark on a rampage, and if the Beasts were cut, a bit more time could have been spent fleshing out the sorely underdeveloped character of Zoroark. Though, we understand that this movie had to bend to its promotional purposes, so, we can't really blame it for that.

The tragedy of Kodai flows well and is explored satisfactorily. He gambled everything on following his visions and making sure they came true, yet the reach of his foresight didn't go beyond the twenty-year limit and did not confirm that he successfully renewed his powers, so there never was any guarantee that following his visions would let him succeed. Kodai assumed that the visions were showing the moments before his success, but actually, they were showing him the moments before his failure. All along, his visions were showing him how he found an illusory Time Ripple and gloated about it, and he tragically put all of his efforts towards locking onto that future of self-ruination. He knowingly destroyed his public image and made it near-certain that he would be discovered as a fraud, confident that all he needed to do was follow his visions. But, when he reached that point of time in reality, he had already expended any public goodwill, and his gloating over his evil-doing sealed his downfall. And, as we said, watching all of this unfold is narratively satisfying.

Overall, this movie was a lot better than we were expecting. If you like watching Pokémon movies, maybe watch this one. Depending on your tolerance for all the shoehorned, distracting, promotional appearances.

References

• For the Holy Soccer animation, we used these assets:
  • For the The Lion of Saint Mark, Archangel Michael, and St. Francis of Assisi, we used religious artwork on the Wikimedia Commons.
  • The transparent pngs of the soccer ball and the goal are free-to-use with attribution (this bulletpoint serves as the attribution!).
  • And the stadium is from StadiumDB, a super in-depth site that documents soccer stadiums. Woah.
  You know what, let's look at the animation again, we had too much fun with this:

  

• Amsterdam, City of Trees and What are the 10 most beautiful trees in town? are articles about the importance of trees in the city of Amsterdam. There's even an interactive online Tree Atlas to view the city-managed trees on a map. You can filter by species, and even click on a particular tree to see when it was planted and other information about that tree on record.
• The Wikipedia article for The Dutch famine of 1944-1945.