*except 2000-Jirachi
Been doing a fun weekly thing with friends where we've been watching a pokemon movie every week for the past 23 weeks.. I frankly don't remember toooooo much out of every movie to do something like a whole* movie franchise ranking or anything but I do have a top three.
(also I'm going to preface this by saying I'm not the biggest of Pokemon fans, and this will be pretty spoiler free)
3! Volcanion and the Mechanical Marvel:
I had absolutely no thoughts about Volcanion before this other than it looked kinda dumb with that big ring on it's back. But now I think it still looks kinda silly but it does look way cooler with it's firehose arms detached and it's also very cool personality wise. To be honest a lot of the enjoyment of this movie to me was just seeing Ash get hurt so much and so frequently after so many movies of him shonen protag-ing all over the place lmao. Also it's entirely shameless in using a Very Literal plot device to tie Ash to the story (Volcanion) for this movie to happen and when it also results in his injury every time he needs to enter a scene it feels like karmic justice on a meta scale from the writers lol.
The setting of the movie is neat too, it really gives Xenoblade and old JRPG vibes, pretty coool. I'm certainly like,,, super biased to liking this movie though, Volcanion carries it to me and that's in no part to it being a protective cool-sounding steam based agender mechanical beast that got me going "me? me? literally me?" the whole time and even if Volcanion is not Literally Me I absolutely love it now regardless..
Oh and the story was good, compared to the other films before it it felt like there was an actual story going on and not Events Happening, I like that the Pokemon reserve Volcanion is protecting being strictly off limits to humans regardless of if they're nice or not since any nice human would respect that the Pokemon there need to heal from their traumatic experiences with hunters and the like first. I honestly can't remember how that was resolved by the end but I remember really respecting that choice and begging that Volcanion wouldn't budge on that rule and that Ash was super annoying trying to butt in with a "but I'm not like those guys" argument each time this very sensible boundary was brought up by Volcanion which just made me emphasize with it more than Ash lmao.
Oh also there was this weird kid with no highlights in his eyes and I was so ready for the reveal he was a robot like Magearna or something lol
2! The Secrets of the Jungle:
This one is really solid and I think has the best villain out of any of the movies I watched. I was joking the entire time about Dr. Zed having done something and lo and behold my jaw was on the floor as it was revealed to have actually happened later in the movie and that was crazy. His ambitions aren't as like grandiosely evil as "destroy the world" but I don't think there's been a single Pokemon movie antagonist so genuinely capital E, EVIL before this guy, he's definitely the most insane and desperate to achieve his goals and has absolutely zero morals, very befitting of a tech CEO lol.
The only main issue I have with this movie is just that it highlights some things about Pokemon that irk me compared to Digimon, which is basically where the line between "Pokemon as species" and "Pokemon as characters" is drawn because sapience and design wise it's really blurry in a way that just feels like a mistake or oversight that got worse as the series went on. Like my main example is the Sword and Shield starters and how they all basically evolve from "Real Believable Species" into "People with Human Jobs" and I really can't wrap my head around that, like I'm sorry Cinerace fans but I can't get over the fact that the idea of a "herd of wild Cinderace" is entirely impossible and absurd for me to imagine and takes me out of it, at least Digimon have the excuse of being digital, and not needing to conform to some notion of familiarity in species, and clearly shown to be singular characters with their own lives for the most part. A Digimon having a job is not weird.
I guess Zarude doesn't have this issue so bad compared to other Pokemon, and I do appreciate that the talking Pokemon of this movie had an explanation that was more interesting than using telepathy because omg let me tell you it was getting OLD really fast that every single legendary in these movies could speak through telepathy which felt like such a "have your cake and eat it too" solution of not needing to confirm that a Pokemon could have the ability to do human things but also not making the legendaries seem more special than Literal Animals. Idk the line between "faceless species" and "character" in Pokemon is so weird to me and something I still can't get over. Uh anyways yeah Dada Zarude is cute and and I love him.
1! The Power of Us: Now this feels like a movie, the first Pokemon movie felt a lot like a decent Pokemon movie but Power of Us feels like a strong movie and the only one with partner characters that don't feel like super blank tropes with no depth to them. With the movies before this one the side characters feel like they're just there because they were in the anime and the writers don't have any idea on what to do with them (I mean Cilan just gets written out of the story for most of his movie appearances lol). This one is just incredibly decent and has animation that doesn't feel like it was done an anime budget. Idk it's just really good. Watch this one.
Dishonorable Mentions:
I Choose You:
Rebooting the movies into their own continuity is kinda weird and this movie doesn't execute trying to condense all of the big moments from the Indigo League series into a runtime of 1hr30min.
Also while trying to speedrun the original series it introduces 3 entirely new characters and none of them fit the vibe and I've never felt more "oh yeah this is a late 2010s kids anime trying to be yokai watch" than seeing them and their designs. Verity is mittsdown the worst rando partner character in any of the movies, she literally adds nothing besides Sinnoh fan service for the like 3 minutes of screentime they gave her. Meanwhile Sorrel is way more interesting than anyone he ever shares the screen with (this include Ash) and the idea of a standalone Pokemon movie revolving around the adventures of a novice traveling doctor learning about different species and taking care of them along the way sounds WAY more interesting than anything to do with gym badges at this point and I just wished the movie was about him instead. Cross is dumb and reeks of 2016 kids anime designs (shotouts to Kieran from SV having a similarly stupid design) and really the vibe of the whole movie feels like it's trying to do a Digimon Adventure Tri or something since that was coming out around the time and the character designs and vibe of it being a reboot trying to hit every emotional nostalgic beat really makes it obvious imo.
Whatever was going on with Pokemon Black and White (the movies):
Trying to do the generational version split with movies is stupid. Why.
Me and my friends had fun pointing out every time a PNG was dragged across the screen to simulate flying at least, no doubt because the budget was split for animating the legendary dragons across both versions.
...Uhhh positive shoutouts to the train from the movie with Shaymin in it, the Darumaka ekiben was really cute too, anyways yep that's all lol