Dragonite and the Special Delivery

PREMISE/STORY/CHARACTERS A girl at the post office in Paldea is bored sorting mail and looks for more interesting work. She ends up hitching a ride with Dragonite and flying to Kanto with a little boy to deliver a letter to his father. Everything about the script is very simple but all the characters' motivations have more than enough weight to them to fill fifteen minutes and the story they create gives us great excuses to see cute Pokemon in action! VISUAL/SOUND This is the real point of Kairyuu to Yuubinyasan and is it ever great. The quality of the drawings is high and we geta lot of expressive movement of people and espeically Pokemon in a variety of settings. We see everything from Litwick melting wax in the post office to Mabosstiff taking a walk to schools of Lanturn illuminating the ocean to Latios and Latias in disguise. This is all presenting with a rapid, almost overwhelming pace that reinforces just how varied the Pokemon setting has become over the past thirty years. The human's voices are fine and the music does its job setting the tone of grand adventure but the highlight here is also the Pokemons' cries. VERDICT: PASS

Dragonite and the Mail Carrier was 2025's anime special to celebrate the 29th anniversary of the Pokémon franchise, and in that regard it succeeds pretty well. The fun little details of how different Pokémon use their powers for the wide variety of tasks required by the post office allowed for a neat flex of world-building creativity, while the gorgeous sweeping shots of landscapes inhabited by wild Pokémon as Dragonite flies across different regions were simply breathtaking, and Evan Call’s explosive soundtrack crams these 14 minutes with so much excitement that I was left in awe by each orchestral swell. While I appreciated the emotion and nostalgiapoured into the central conflict of the story and even got a little teary-eyed at its resolution, the hyper-optimism and positivity of the Pokémon world does a bit more heavy-lifting than I would have preferred, and the overall story feels like it needed more development to really leave an impact, but for a short inspired by a one-off creative choice for a 27-year-old movie, they still managed to flesh this idea out rather well. The past half decade has been incredible for limited-run Pokémon projects like this and at this point it’s probably what I look forward to the most from this franchise, and while this one was just a tad bit underwhelming by comparison, it still manages to scratch that itch for wonder and adventure that makes me love Pokémon so much.