Pokémon the Series: Sun & Moon

I remember seeing the first few episodes of pokemon Black and White on TV when they were first coming out over here and I was rather upset about them. My biggest gripe was with Ash’s character design, which was made to look younger. So I can totally understand the mindset behind the people who are upset about the change in art style the show has made, which is much bigger in contrast than it was in Black and White. Yet I’m not on their side this time. In fact I really love the new art style and how colourful and round it is. In factI love almost everything about the new Sun and Moon anime, so much so that it might be the most I’ve ever enjoyed pokemon. Even as a kid I wasn’t as entranced by pokemon as I am now; back then it was just day to day business. Yet despite how much I think it’s great, Pokemon Sun and Moon is very controversial amongst fans and there’s a lot of people who are very mad at it. Clearly these people, most of whom are certainly long term pokemon fans, have ideas about what a pokemon series should contain, that Sun and Moon isn’t living up to. So in this review I don’t just want to talk about all the things that I love about the anime, but I will occasionally also lightly touch up on some criticisms of the show and why I don’t share them. I’m hoping I can not only show people whether they fall into the group that would actually enjoy Sun and Moon or not, but also help some people to appreciate it, who didn’t already. Naturally there is one aspect of the Sun and Moon anime that is immediately obviously different from the earlier installments of the show: the art style. Gone are the spiky haired shounen character designs of the original series, as they’re replaced by these new round and colourful ones. The water colour (or at least water-colour-looking) backgrounds of the original series are replaced by digital ones, that are even greener. Though that is an earlier innovation from long before Sun and Moon. The animation, too, has changed considerably. The animation is much more fluid now, with the animators having incorporated a lot more smear frames to make it more expressive. Everything about the look of Sun and Moon is much more poppy and expressive, which adds to the much more lighthearted tone of the show. But why did Ash’s character design change so much? X and Y seemed to be going excellently, with lots of fans loving it and lots of people in the industry praising it. Why suddenly make such a big shift in such a big aspect of a show that’s going really well? Was it an evil scheme by the producers of the show to make pokemon look more like youkai watch so they can make more money? Well, no, not exactly. The thing you have to realize is that Ash’s character design has always been changing and it has always been changing too slowly. Even during the original series you saw his design slowly change and the makers of the show have always been very careful to implement new digital technology as gradually as possible, so that people wouldn’t notice. The difference here is that there is suddenly a big change, instead of a gradual one. An often noted fact about X and Y was that though the battle scenes were able to look really great due to all the innovations the team was already starting to make back then, Ash himself was rarely animated and the team even had a couple of stock animations of Ash throwing a pokeball, because no one wanted to animate him. The thing that pushed the team over the edge to change the character designs so drastically now, was that OLM was experimenting with more modern digital animation techniques and simpler, more rounded character designs are useful for that. The reason why pokemon now looks more like youkai watch, is because the character designs in youkai watch were also made to fit the same criteria. Though the fact that people unironically and without question put forth the idea that the character designs were made to match those of youkai watch, as if pokemon is some cheap cash grab that’s trying to leach off the popularity of that series, is some of the funniest stuff I’ve ever heard. Despite that, I’m not actually a huge fan of Ash’s redesign. His original design came from a time of spiky haired shounen protagonists, animated with coloured cells. His design was made for a different era of animation and so when adapting his design for modern animation techniques, it’s impossible not to lose something along the way, especially if the priority was to make him easy to animate, rather than nice to look at. If you try to play a game of spot the main character in Sun and Moon, you wouldn’t be spotting Ash, as he just doesn’t look as well designed as the other major characters in the show. Then again, that might have more to do with the fantastic character designs the other characters in Sun and Moon have. So what’s up with the rest of the Sun and Moon character designs? The original series started in the 90s, when it was very common for TV anime to make up for a lack of animation quantity, with beautiful and detailed character designs. And pokemon has always had great character designs, even if they didn’t always animate as well. Sun and Moon takes the opposite approach, using very simple character designs to have them animate better. What you have to consider, though, is that when you make a simple character design, you draw significantly fewer lines, and as such, every line becomes more important and has to be more carefully considered. As such, creating a simple character design, that’s also really good and very memorable, is a lot harder that it may seem at first. It’s incredible to see just how many unique and extremely memorable designs Sun and Moon manages to have and how many designs from the games were flawlessly adapted for 2d animation. And the games themselves had a different design focus as well, moving away from their more anime inspired character designs, giving them a much wider appeal. As a result, Pokemon Sun and Moon has a completely unique look within the wider anime landscape. What Sun and Moon has actually retained from older pokemon, however, is that the character designs of the girls tend to look better than that of the boys. Suiren is a very cute and unique looking tomboy and Moa looks very sweet, but Kaki and Maamane look pretty boring in comparison, though certainly not bad. On top of that, there’s the ever adorable Lillie, who seems to be the unanimous winner among all the Sun and Moon characters and has a genuine cult following behind her. Sure, not every design in Sun and Moon gets to be that unique, but there are a lot of great ones, even outside of the main characters, and I personally think this season of pokemon might have the largest quantity of great looking character designs yet. So what about this animation that I keep mentioning? A lot of people didn’t just lament the character designs and the “graphics” of the new pokemon anime, when Sun and Moon was just announced, they also called out the animation of the show for being bad. Now, many of these people were the type of people who would pause on a smear frame and call it bad animation, completely negligent of the fact that animation only happens when you have multiple frames, or of the fact that the usage of smear frames is an industry standard, so don’t take them too seriously. But what would someone who actually knows anything about animation think about Sun and Moon? Well, mostly that it is extremely impressively well animated. You have to note, pokemon is a long running anime, so every episode has to be made, on average, in about a week. So the fact that it has been consistently one of the most impressively well, if not the most impressively well, animated anime of every season it has been a part of, is ludicrous. In fact, Sun and Moon might be the most animated long running TV anime of all time. And that is no exaggeration. I think the big disconnect people have with Sun and Moon is in the animation style. The focus of previous seasons has always been on the pokemon. If you look at the pokemon from Sun and Moon and from the original show you can barely see the difference, where if you look at the character designs between those shows, or even between the original show and X and Y, you see a much bigger change. The pocketmonster designs have always remained relevant and animating them has always been easy. Or at least for the small ones. The reason why Ash’s pokemon rarely evolve might partially be caused by the fact that smaller pokemon are easier to animate. Though the more important reason is because those unevolved pokemon might simply have better designs than their evolved counterparts, and one of the main purposes of the pokemon anime has always been to sell merchandise. The fact that the people in pokemon were rarely animated in any interesting way was never a problem, because it was always about the pokemon, even (or maybe especially) in battle focused X and Y. But Sun and Moon puts a much larger focus on the characters and wants to express a lot more emotions and a lot fewer battles. As such, goofy faces and all kinds of expressions and animations that leave or bend the limitations of the original character models are everywhere. In a show like X and Y, the characters will rarely move much and will rarely go off model; and a lot of people are into that. I think a lot of people just want their anime characters to be on model all the time and be more serious, most of the time, like the characters in a show like Legend of the Galactic heroes. Sure, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but you get what I mean. But as much as I like that show, and as much as I think that style works for it, I would usually much rather see creative, goofy animation, than stiff animation that’s unwilling to bend it’s character models(even if the show has fantastic visual directing that makes it work). I just love anything that’s goofy and creative. Goofy faces and smeary animation are my bread and butter. I can’t get enough of them. Naturally, if you have a lighthearted show like Sun and Moon, you need fun characters to populate that show. The main six at the pokemon school all have their goofs, at different levels. Ash himself is laid back at times, but easily excitable. Unlike Ash in the original show, he’s not very bratty and he seems to take life as it comes to him, not the other way around. He’s not as concerned about becoming a pokemon master, and really just wants to have fun and do a few island trials. I’ve seen a lot of people call him childish in comparison to his X and Y counterpart, but I think they might have the terms ‘serious’ and ‘mature’ confused. These two are not the same thing. I remember being a six year old, being annoyed at adults for acting in a goofy manner. Who do you think knew more about maturity? Six year old me, or actual adults, who thought it was perfectly fine to be an adult that still loves being silly? For the most part during the show Ash is understanding of people and pokemon and tries his best to make friends. This is a far cry from the stubborn Ash in season 1 who still has a lot of growth to do. If you compare Sun and Moon Ash to original Ash, he’s definitely grown a lot over the years and I personally even look up to his attitude. He’s really found his way and is enjoying the little things in life. He probably read all of “Á la recherche du temps perdu” on the boat over to Alola. And the way that he combines that attitude with him still being loud and funny and excitable is just really fun to watch. Then there’s all these side characters. Lillie is the most popular and the most developed. She is initially scared of pokemon and has a bad relationship with her mother, but works through that. She’s very reserved but it becomes increasingly clear as the show goes on that she does actually want to be a part of the main group and be goofy right along with them. And seeing her pulling goofy faces or trying to be brave is just so cute. She’s adorable. I can definitely see why she has such a strong cult following. My personal favourite side character might be Suiren, though. She’s a tomboy who loves fishing, but she’s much more than that. She’s one of the funniest characters in the show. Sometimes she just does really funny things out of nowhere, just to mess with people, and she’s always up for whatever cool things the guys are doing. She’s the most surprising character out of all and you just never know when she will do something completely insane out of nowhere. Though her tomboyish nature doesn’t mean she can’t be girly. She and Mao are best friends and she can be just as girly as Mao when she wants. It’s nice to see a tomboy in media who hasn’t completely rejected femininity altogether. I think that’s more a stereotype than anything. The only downside to Suiren is that she isn’t always doing funny stuff or saying funny things. I think a more consolidated cast, where Suiren had more focus put on her, could have made her an incredibly fun character to watch. As she is right now she’s kind of inconsistent. Her friend Mao is a little more boring. She’s cute and fun, but not extremely memorable. She runs a restaurant with her dad and is overall a good, hardworking girl. On the guy’s side there’s Kaki who is one of Ash’s rivals this season, though not his main one. Most of the time he’s acting more serious, but when the situation calls for it he can be the goofiest one of them all. There are lots of funny jokes and cool animation moments involving him and he becomes adorable when anything involves his little sister. Just like Suiren, he’s somewhat of a mixed bag, but I love him anyways. These characters make up the heart of what makes Sun and Moon so enjoyable. I’ve heard people complain that the characters in Sun and Moon don’t get enough development, but I have to disagree on that one. I don’t think developing a character significantly is necessary to create a fun and engaging piece of media. The fact that these characters are still making me laugh over 140 episodes in is a testament to how well they work. Though, sure, any character can always be better. I’m saying that these characters are vastly more than sufficient to make me thoroughly enjoy the show. Oh, also there’s Maamane. He’s fat. Also he likes tech. I think we can all agree that Maamane kinda sucks. Luckily there are enough other side characters that are fun to watch to make up for him. Now it’s great and all that the show has so many fun characters, but what is the episode to episode experience of watching it like? What is it like structurally? What is the story about? Of course you likely have already noticed that this part isn’t as important to me, considering how much I’ve been gushing about all the other aspects of the show, but naturally the structure is important to any show. And it’s extremely interesting to look at what parts of the original show Sun and Moon decided to keep or emphasize and what parts to lessen. I’ve said that Sun and Moon has less battling and that’s true, but when it comes to important battles, like gym battles or league battles, it’s not actually that far behind it’s predecessors. What it does away with is actually mostly team rocket battles and battles between Ash and random people he encounters. There’s far less of that in Sun and Moon and I think that’s good. Even in the original show team Rocket’s spiel got tiresome pretty quickly, so seeing their episodes be replaced with creative episodic episodes and them being relegated to comedic relief is fantastic. And the fights that are still there, mostly island trial battles, rival battles or league battles, are generally pretty good. Though even in the original pokemon series it took until the Johto league, 270 episodes in, before I saw any battles that truly excited me, and Sun and Moon was a similar situation. Sun and Moon got a lot of flak for focusing more on slice of life, rather than adventure, but I think that, in actuality, it doesn’t really matter. I mean, the gang can still go adventuring out in the woods or on other islands and is that really much different from the gang in the original getting lost in similar looking woods all the time? Structurally, all it really changes is that the main characters don’t sleep in the same location as each other and that they don’t have to go out looking for a pokemon center, every time they find a pokemon that’s hurt, which constantly happened in the original show. Really, it’s not even that much of a structural difference to the show. If the writers want the gang to go into some cave they go into some cave. It may be a slice of life show, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an adventure show. The only real fear is of the aesthetic, the idea of them being on an adventure, being lost. But I don’t think that’s even a problem, considering Ash is already far away from home here and the geography on the island seems to be much more varied than all those similar looking woods and plains from the original show. X and Y emphasized the battling aspect of the original show and tried to make it more exciting, but Sun and Moon emphasizes the episodic adventures and makes them funnier and more creative. It does focus a lot more on people than the original, though, which focused largely on pokemon and their relationship to human society, but other that that, it’s not even like Sun and Moon does a lot the original didn’t already. Sun and Moon and X and Y just emphasize different aspects of what made the original great. In that sense I think they are both great successors to the original pokemon series and should both have the right to exist. Pokemon Sun and Moon puts a lot of emphasis on episodic episodes, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any story to it at all. The overall narrative is about Ash going to a new region and trying to beat all of this island’s versions of gym leaders with the new pokemon he’s caught over there. This is typical of pokemon series past the original, but there’s one key difference, which greatly affects the tone of the series. Ash rarely, mentions the idea of becoming a pokemon master, unlike his first season counterpart, who can’t shut up about becoming one. From the very beginning his journey to Alola is never about beating some pokemon league. It’s purely about experiencing local culture, meeting new people, catching new pokemon, and maybe challenging some tough trainers he meets along the way. Ash in Sun and Moon seems to have realized that the adventures he has and the people he meets along the way are much more important than the end goal of his journey itself. He’s excited about every new thing he gets to experience, and welcomes every distraction along the way. And the show itself is similar. The show wants to do as many different things as possible and will actively avoid the trap of centering an episode on team rocket stealing Pikachu or relegating a large chunk of almost every episode to that. But besides all kinds of creative episodes the show also has some story arcs that can get very exciting and emotional. The show does like to pack an emotional punch from time to time, which I appreciate, and it’s not scared to talk about death. Sun and Moon is a varied experience, and because of that, doesn’t get tiresome or monotonous very quickly. Now, though these arcs and individual episodes can get very serious, for the most part Sun and Moon is still very lighthearted and casual. From the very beginning, Ash just wants to have fun and beat some island challenges. Participating in the pokemon league was never a part of the plan, because at the start of the show the pokemon league didn’t exist yet in Alola. In the original show Ash explicitly wants to go to Johto to participate in the league there. Ash’s focus has clearly changed and so has the show’s. To previous seasons the pokemon league was the goal and beating it the ultimate test. But in Alola, the league is a casual experience among friends and neighbors, likely a remnant of the earlier island trial tradition. So when the League in Sun and Moon came around and didn’t take itself as seriously as it had in previous seasons a lot of fans were upset. But I think this is a case of wrong expectations. The battles in the Alola league were good, even if they weren’t that big. There were a few comedy fights or fights with funny moments in them, and I can understand that someone who takes the league very seriously might be bothered by that, but those fights were all fun to watch either way. A show doesn’t need massive stakes for it to be enjoyable. It can just be about the personal stakes of a couple characters you care about. Ash facing off against his rivals this season wasn’t really any less exciting than it was in previous seasons, because rival battles have always been about personal stakes. The fact that the Alola league didn’t feel as grandiose and official points to the fact that this season of pokemon has a different appeal, and that’s really too bad for people who simply want out of pokemon what they got from X and Y. But the appeal that Sun and Moon is going for it’s doing fantastically. And with that we finally reach the end. Ash has said that he wants to see the rest of the world, and the next pokemon series is going to be about him travelling the world. Team rocket finally answers the question “What even is this feeling?” with “what a great feeling”, yet they only realized this right as they had to leave. I’d love to see where these characters go next, however it seems that Sword and Shield might become a reboot instead of a sequel. Either way, it seems that Sword and shield is once again going for a slightly different appeal from the last two series, and I think it will be a little less controversial because the appeal might lie more in the middle and Ash’s design is more pleasing to look at. To someone who doesn’t like Sun and Moon it might seem that their nightmare is finally over. To me it’s just yet another opportunity for a unique, new pokemon anime. Though I am sad to have to say goodbye to my favourite season of pokemon and I’m unsure if the next season will truly live up to it, but considering I haven’t heard anything about significant staff changes, I’m not that scared. You didn’t need to read all the way through this review to understand whether Sun and Moon was going to be your thing or not. You’d have seen whether you were on one line with me a few paragraphs in. If all that goofy fun stuff and those goofy faces and all that creative animation sounds great to you, you’re probably someone who is much more open about the fact that you like media that can just be fun and doesn’t need to be anything more. Otherwise if you still lament the fact that Sun and Moon doesn’t have as many battles, or if you want it to be more ‘serious’ and ‘adult’ you’ll probably dislike it. There’s a middle ground of people who think it’s just okay, but either way you can probably tell. But I’m not actually expecting many people to be reading this review to try and understand whether they’d like it or not. Most people have probably already seen it and made up their minds a long time ago. If you loved the show you probably wanted someone to talk about what you loved about it, in an endless sea of haters. And if you dislike it, you’re probably reading this review to discredit me. You probably, by now, think I’m a dipshit and this review is probably just making you angry. I just hope I got you to understand my perspective just a little bit. If 4200 words of a glowing review didn’t already tell you, I love pokemon Sun and Moon. I just have so much fun watching it. And that one word, “fun” speaks to the core of the show for me. The animators and writers of the show turned pokemon into what it is because that would be fun. Industry professionals from all over the industry praise the hell out of the Sun and Moon anime, and considering the amount of anime references that are in it, you can clearly tell that the creators of Sun and Moon still have lots of passion for the medium of anime and still have lots of fun creating pokemon. And I still have lots of fun watching it. The older I get the more I realize that the main thing I’m looking to get out of anime is fun. I love media that gives me joy, because there is no feeling I’d rather feel than joy. Sun and Moon’s fun characters, their funny expressions, the expressive animation, the references to all kinds of anime I love and the occasional emotional punch the show still has the weight to throw around, I love it all so much. There are few things in life that give me so much joy as knowing that pokemon is still fun to watch, 15 years after I first started watching it. Sure it isn’t perfect. Every episodic show, even something as prolific as Bebop or space dandy, is going to have weaker episodes. In particular I’d say episode 26 is kinda trash, though I’ll forgive it for how great episode 28 is. Still, Sun and Moon might be the best kids anime I’ve ever seen, and that says a lot considering how much I love Ojamajo Doremi. On that topic, If you loved Sun and Moon and you want to watch stuff like it, I’d highly recommend Ojamajo Doremi, which also has simpler more expressive character designs, with every facial reaction under the sun. You’ll probably also love Heartcatch precure and Sailor moon and you might even be into 100% Pascal sensei(and be a part of an exclusive club of like 3 people who like that show), and you’ll definitely be into Mahoujin Guruguru(2017). If you prefer X and Y, you’ll be delighted to know there’s an entire genre of anime that has the same appeal of that show. It’s called the “Shounen action” genre. You might have heard of it; it’s fairly popular. Of course that includes stuff like Hunter x Hunter(2011) and Fullmetal alchemist, that most people have already seen, but it’s a vast genre that you’re not going to watch all of anytime soon. If you somehow don’t know how to find that stuff, you can always PM me for recommendations. Anyways, I hope that regardless of whether you like Sun and Moon or not, we can all come to one agreement: Let’s hope Sword and Shield is going to be the best pokemon anime yet.