Pokémon 3 - The Movie was surprisingly entertaining.
Molly's father discovers Unown, a group of letter-shaped Pokémon (to paraphrase
Team Rocket: "They're like alphabet soup, but without the soup"). He
disappears, and Molly uses the Unown's psychic power to create an environment
derived from her imagination, including Entei, a lion-like Pokémon who
she sees as her father. Anyway, Ash's mother gets kidnapped, and Ash & friends
need to rescue her and turn things back to normal. The art and animation looks
much better than the two previous movies. The character designs are the same,
but the action scenes are just much more dynamic than before. The US-composed
score adds a lot more tension to the scenes. With all the effort in designing
all those cute creatures, it's kinda disappointing the creators never tried to
give each Pokémon it's own unique character, and add a little bit more
sophistication to the series. Character development is still very minimal, but
the pacing is decent, the action is continuous, and Molly is cute (adult Molly,
yay!). Every Pokémon movie has a short before the main feature, Pokémon
3 is no different. This time it's called Pikachu & Pichu, and features
tons of new Pokémon I wasn't familiar with. Again, all the Pokémon
need to work together to prevent their playground from collapsing, it's really
quite cute :) But where is Psyduck?
(3.5)
