If there’s one thing the Pokemon world has in common with our world, it’s the fact that it’s always changing, and if you’ll excuse the pun, always evolving. What we understand to be true is never certain, and there will always be new mysteries awaiting us around every corner. For Spencer Hale, a researcher whose most recent obsession has alienated his wife into abandoning him and their five year old daughter, the most tantalizing mystery of all is The Unown, an elusive breed of Pokemon who take their forms from the western letter system, and who are rumored to haunt some of the most ancient ruins in existence. Spencer Hale searches for these pokemon, presumably because he wants to be able to add text to his photos really badly, and is spirited away as a result. Left all alone, his daughter Molly makes a desperate wish, and the Unown grant it, giving her an Entei to fill in for her father, abducting Delia Ketchum to play her mother, and freezing the once beautiful community of Greenfield under a blanket of crystals. Can Ash Ketchum and his companions undo this disaster before it’s too late?

This is usually the point in a review where I would talk about the people and history behind an anime’s production, but there really isn’t any new ground to cover, as I’m pretty sure every Pokemon movie was produced by the same company, and directed by the exact same man, Kunihiko Yuyama. No, none of this information has changed from my last few Pokemon reviews, but thankfully, one little detail has kind of changed... This is probably the best looking entry into the Pokemon franchise that I’ve ever seen. Now, just so we’re all on the same page, I don’t think the Pokemon franchise has ever looked bad, necessarily... I know there’s a new art style that they implemented more recently that’s really unpopular, but I haven't personally seen anything from that period in the show’s run... I’m way more familiar with the classic style, and as far as I can remember, it’s always looked good enough at the absolute worst.

Considering the fact that Pokemon is primarily a children’s show, and that it began airing in the mid nineties, I don’t think it’s as fair to look at it through a modern lens as it is to say that at the time, this was probably one of the best looking anime on the market, and one that largely retained it’s level of quality even as the anime industry transitioned from cell shading to digital painting. I do, for the record, think the classic seasons DO hold up way better than a lot of anime from the time, although it mostly only looked good enough to pass muster, but never as any kind of visual wonder. The movies, in particular, have always had this really bad reputation for how insistent they were on using CG imagery that stood out awkwardly and clashed horrendously with the 2D characters... The first movie did hold back and try to be subtle, but the second movie went way too overboard with it. This movie, though? They took the smart route.

You may notice right off the bat that the CG in this movie is uncanny and creepy looking, and fucking good, that’s the effect they were going for. The Unown are mostly rendered in CG, which helps them to stand out and feel every bit as otherworldly and alien as this story needs them to be. They look unsettling and wrong, which makes them feel like a genuine threat, and we’ll get to why that’s a good thing later. More importantly, the phenomenon in Greenfield looks as creepy and off-putting as all hell. I feel like it would have been really easy to design the expanding crystalline surface of the town as just a bunch of generic looking, angular blue rock, but this shit has some insane detail to it, I swear to God there were veins in there. You could set a horror video game in this anime, and it wouldn’t feel out of place. It feels so otherworldly that it hosts multiple diverse set pieces and none of them feel out of place. Now, is frightening imagery appropriate for a children’s movie? I mean, it’s probably nothing most kids couldn’t handle. I dunno, I think it looks cool as fuck.

Now that alone would be impressive, but the Pokemon company just had to go one step further with this movie, making the 2D animation look way smoother and richer this time around as well. You may notice this really early on during a battle that Ash has against a new side character named Lisa, and not only do the battles look jaw droppingly articulate, full of long shots and full combat animations, instead of trying to save money through close-ups and quick cuts, but the trainers themselves celebrate with a little showboating every time they score a win, with full-body dancing and everything. And yeah, we do get one battle early on with the theme song from the anime at that time playing over it, that’s pretty much standard, but we get other battles throughout the story... I’m told this is something none of the other movies did, I’ll just assume that’s correct... And they all retain the same level of quality. Obviously I wasn’t there during the production process, but I get the feeling this movie had a little more money to work with than the others, and it does not go unnoticed.

The English dub is more of the same, but that's still a good thing. You still get the classic dub cast, with Veronica Taylor playing both Ash and his Mother believably as two separate people with a tight, familial bond between them. The late and dearly missed Rachel Lillis plays both Misty and Jessie as equally distinct from one another. Eric Stuart is less annoying than usual as Brock and James, we’ll get to that, and Amy Birmbaum is a nice addition to the cast as the adorable and very believably child like Molly Hale. Lisa Ortiz pops in as Lisa, she has an easily recognizable voice thanks to her iconic performance from Slayers, and I love hearing her pop up in random places. Most importantly, though, we get two different characters... Entei and Spencer Hale... Played by the legendary Dan Green, best known for playing the lead role in Yugioh and Mewtwo in other Pokemon movies, and he plays such a cool Entei that they’ve called him back to reprise this role in other projects. It’s as solid as a dub from the early Pokemon days will always be.

So, over the last few years, a weird trend that I keep running into is that I’ll decide to review an anime I haven’t seen in a long time, thinking it’ll be like shooting fish in a barrel because of how bad I remember it being, only to wind up eating some serious Murkrow while writing the actual review because of how drastically my opinion had changed. It happened with A Channel, Ebiten, even School Days, but I was really not expecting it to happen with the third Pokemon movie. Of course I never thought I would be reviewing this movie... I even skipped it at one point and reviewed the Celebi movie instead... But then it got featured in a pretty cool short for AMV Hell 8, so it ultimately wormed its way back into my brain. Now why didn’t I like it the first time around? I don’t know, it was literally 25 years ago. I was much more pretentious and cynical as a teenager, and I remember being instantly turned off by anything in a piece of media that felt transparent, so maybe I didn’t like that it was a glorified vehicle for a couple of new pokemon, even though that’s just what Pokemon movies have always been?

Maybe it was out of loyalty to the previous film. Maybe it was because even back then, I knew that Unown was the worst pokemon ever. They can only use one move apiece, it takes a ton of time and effort to collect them for virtually no reward, several of the letters are questionably represented at best(seriously, why does Unown B look like a figure 8?) and when it comes to competitive play, it would struggle to be viable in fucking Little Cup. Hell, ever since Gen 2 came out, various pokemon will receive updates every generation... New evolutions, alternative evolutions, baby forms, type changes, regional variants, regional fakes... They have done none of this for Unown, and I have never heard a single person asking them to. There are hundreds of times more people demanding a Shuckle evolution than there are people asking Gamefreak or The Pokemon Company to make Unown relevant. Not even relevant again, just relevant. This makes it slightly infuriating that the Japanese title promoted Entei while the English one only promotes Unown.

In any case, I don’t know why I didn’t like this movie at the time, but now that I’m watching it as an adult... Holy shit, no Pokemon movie has ever had any right to be this good. First of all, the actual plot is actually kind of subversive. This is going to be a bit of a generalization, but I’m pretty sure I can boil the rest of the Pokemon movies I’ve seen down to a simple formula that is, at least, more or less accurate. Ash is travelling, a legendary pokemon is crashing out for some reason while he’s in the area, causing some world-threatening clusterfuck that he gets dragged into and has to solve because nobody else can. This movie doesn’t really do that. Yeah, a couple of legendary/mysterious Pokemon are causing problems, but it’s happening in a localized area, it’s happening to people Ash knows, and his own mother is trapped by it, making the stakes feel far more personal, even though they’re technically smaller. The story may feel less grand as a result, but as the trade off, it also feels more intimate and gives you more reason to care.

It’s also nice that Ash isn’t the only one trying to solve the problem. When the creepy ass crystals overtake the town, people outside of Ash’s friends and allies actually step up. Yeah, their efforts are in vain, but who cares? People actually take the initiative of trying to bulldoze their way through, that one scene adds so much life to the world around our characters. The plot is also, like, way ahead of its time. It’s really common now for cartoons(especially in the west) to use dark metaphorical story-telling to work through a character’s trauma, but I don’t think that was a thing back in the early 2000s. In particular, the plot surrounding Molly involves an interdimensional being creating an idealistic scenario for her while developing the town in a bizarre false reality in order to keep people on the outside from reaching her and bringing her back out of her fantasy... Doesn’t that kind of remind you of Weirdmageddon from Gravity Falls? Like I said, ahead of its time, nobody else was doing this shit back then.

The actual Pokemon representation is also really strong... This movie takes place during Johto Journeys, so of course there’s a healthy amount of Gen-2 pokemon put on display throughout. Every member of Ash’s team at that point in the series gets a chance to shine both in and out of battle, including in a few moments when he actually uses his Pokemon in clever, creative ways to get past all of the obstacles present in Molly’s crystal world. Speaking of battles, there are a few, and they’re really good battles. Obviously they carry the baggage of the anime not working the same way the games do, that's just a conceit that you have to accept if you’re going to watch the pokemon anime, so there are several moments that you could nitpick, but it is nice to see Pikachu’s electricity not work against a ground type for once. Also, the attention to detail is so good that when Molly is battling in her crystal world, I swear the Pokemon she uses are the ones she was shown having pictures and memorabilia of earlier.

Her fantasy pokemon are also portrayed as stronger than they should be, which Brock explains while THANKFULLY not getting creepy with Molly in her false adult form, no, he battles her while engaging in the entirely wholesome banter that you would use against a kid you’re babysitting while you’re gaslighting them into thinking you’re NOT letting them win. This kinda low-key explains why Entei is made to look like a badass, instead of the lower-tier version of Arcanine that he is in real life. And speaking of badass, I’m just going to go ahead and spoil this... Sorry, anyone who hasn’t seen this 25 year old movie yet... They bring back Charizard for the final fight, and while it comes out of nowhere and makes no sense, I’ll be damned if it isn’t some fun, blood-pumping fanservice. No surprise that the real antagonists of the story are the Unown, who feel more like a force of nature than actual villains, and you have to give some kudos to the only entry in the Pokemon franchise that makes them look good.

Now obviously, this movie isn’t perfect. It is a Pokemon movie, after all, and they’re always going to be fertile ground for nitpicks. There’s always going to be some stupid bullshit, and there are always going to be some little moments that make no sense, but they’re not that bad here. It’s not like they made the colossal mistake of including baby Nidoqueens a second time. My biggest complaint is, honestly, something that just happens in movies like these... Franchise films that are basically considered non-canon to their respective parent anime. It’s the fact that the Hale family never appeared or got referenced outside of this film. It’s the same grievance I had over the character of Domino not returning after Mewtwo returns, only it’s worse, because the Hales are allegedly supposed to be Ash’s family friends. These are my only real complaints, though, because... I can’t believe I’m saying this... This Pokemon movie is objectively superior to my Pokemon the movie 2000, my favorite Pokemon movie. The story is more sophisticated, the plot is more intricate, the writing has more depth, and it’s just more emotionally engaging overall. How I could have possibly hated this movie 25 years ago is Unown to me.

Don't get me wrong, this movie isn't replacing my favorite one... I personally believe it's important to keep your personal and professional taste separate... I just acknowledge that it's the better movie.

I give Pokemon 3: Spell of the Unown an 8/10