Pokemon 9 thoughts

[joshpho]

Rewatched Pokemon Ranger and the Temple of the Sea last night. I know it gets a lot of flack since it's really the "runt" of the movie series--no real battles--but it has one saving point.

• It's a gorgeous movie.

I would even dare say that it has the best/most consistent color palette out of any of the movies. It's tough to capture that point in a few gifs, but if you watch the whole thing you'll know what I mean. They really liked the red/blue theme, with May's outfit contrasting with the constant sea shots. There were also a lot of gold/green highlights in the movie, like the crests on ships/Phantom's outfit and various foliage. The only downsides to the visuals that I really saw were the CGI: the mountains and ships done with it looked like they came out of a N64 game, unfortunately. :( Even with that though, it looks like the designers had a lot of fun with the palette of the whole thing. It's very well done and very vibrant, I think! Plus, the director traveled to Rome to get an idea of the settings for the film. How cool is that?

Another nice thing is the human designs. Most of the movie-exclusive characters in the series are fairly generic and unmemorable (excluding Sir Aaron), but Captain Ship/Lizabeth/Jackie/Phantom all have pretty original designs and really work well on the screen.

The only other thing that I thought set this movie apart in the technical depertment was the pacing. This isn't to put down the other movies: they're all great, and the pacing is generally very smooth. That being said, I really thought they outdid themselves with this one. The whole boat setting that the gang was on really helped this: instead of constant tension, there was a whole exotic element weaving itself in with the main story. This really helped with the ambience and made a really nice balance with the action scenes. I thought some of the other films (i.e. Jirachi Wishmaker) were a bit too linear even for Pokemon--action, dialogue, action, dialogue...--whereas the new setting for M09 was a breath of fresh air. Also, the ambience! There were much more pauses and expressions to really bring the emotion of the movie home. Bravo.

Any rate, such is my 2c on the film. This was my second time seeing it and I'd definitely reccomend a rewatch to any water type fans. They're featured like no other!

Without furtho ado, here's my .gif dump. Let me know if you guys would like something like this for the other films!