Pokémon Evolutions, A New Animated Series, Will Air Free On YouTube This Month

New Pokémon anime shorts and series are always welcome!

We get to take a break from the neverending adventures of Ash "Peter Pan" Ketchum. Good.

Looks like as games went alive now!

this might be unpopular of an opinion, but i feel mainline pokemon could benefit from having anime cutscenes instead of crappy 3d ones, it could be like persona, where the game is 3d but it has anime cutscenes with soe 3d here and there

This is the most excited I've been for a pokemon thing all year. I wish they would scrap Ash and make an actual amazing anime following a new group of characters.

It looks like its generations but what the protagonist experience.

Maybe work on making the games good again if you're going to market them with these animated shorts? Wait, just kidding. They only care about using the games as a means to sell merchandise.

@NikHogan Its going to be harder because of trainer customization.

@Dafirelive crap, never thought about that

Anything that makes Pokemon as epic as Adventures does is fine with me. Looks awesome! I'm still waiting for them to get rid of Ash and make the anime more like Adventures.

They need to get rid of the main show and just make lots of limited anime series like this, Generations, Twilight Wings, and Origins. They are much higher quality than the main series and more respectful of the source material.

@Flamethrower Yeah but Ash is the Mario of Pokemon so we will be with him forever. He's the mascot.

So unfortunately until one of the heads at Pokemon Company decide to take a leap of faith, we will be with Ash for the foreseeable future.

@NikHogan Well it's not that a Hybrid of the two is bad, it's just low quality of animation that makes the 3d cut scenes terrible. I'm pretty sure if alot of effort was put into we could have a wonderful 2d/3d hybrid and the best of both worlds.

It can be done.

@Fangleman32 absolutely!

More accurate episode names would be:

Gen 1: Buggy mess
Gen 2: Gridding hell
Gen 3: Waterland
Gen 4: Super Slow
Gen 5: Please fire the designer
Gen 6: Cutscenes
Gen 7: Ultra Cutscenes
Gen 8: The Laziness

@DomGC I don't get what you're trying to say but you hang in there, champ.

More realistic Leon will give me nightmares.

Pretty cool they can give us stuff like this, But not video games like this.

FR pokemon legends look's dope.

@NikHogan somehow I haven't heard this idea before. I'd certainly be down. Kinda similar to how the most recent Legends Arceus trailer had an animated portion at the end of it.

This sounds intense. I might keep this in mind if Im bored and have nothing to do.

@xavieruniverse Well I have seen this technique used a couple of times to work around the protagonist. Simply just don't feature them in 2d cut scenes. I can't recall the game, but years ago, I played one where they had 2d cut scenesfeatured all the side characters while your character didn't appear at all.

It might be a weird approach, but there's not much you can do with 2d and custom characters. Maybe one day in the far future, we will have the tech where a base character is drawn, and an AI can draw over him/her featuring any of the custom features from a character creator.

I’m excited for this, since they’ll finally be able to flesh out the games that weren’t covered in Generations. This is effectively just Generations 2, but with one episode per gen, instead of 2-3 of them.

For all the criticisms you can make of the Pokemon Co. and their business model, one area where they've been nailing it is short format animations. There's been several "Poketoon" shorts this year from the studio that made Twilight Wings, and they've been my favourite yet. They're still yet to be localized.

Looks super rad!

@Dafirelive I think higher quality cutscenes for less customization is a fair trade. The easiest thing to do would be to save customization and online battles for postgame.

I find the most interesting bit here is that they diverged from the Pokemon art aesthetic that they've attached themselves to since gen 3's FireRed/LeafGreen where Sugamori really started to change his personal art preferences and it hasn't evolved much since. Which had always disappointed me personally, as his watercolor artwork still remains the best Pokemon has ever looked. Leon here now just looks like he's from the wrong anime.

Overall idea I'm on board for, but again, personal grievance is the gen 7 episode is freaking Ultra nonsense. Game Freak, I don't CARE about Necrosma and the Ultra titles. You had the superior story in base Sun and Moon, you had interesting lore nuggets of Guzma being physically abused by his father beating him with his golf clubs or the whole thing about Lillie being forced into the parental role reversal taking care of her mentally ill likewise-abusive mother, seeking medical treatment in Kanto that we never got to see. All the Ultra games contributed was to keep the gen 7 tedium and cut out all the interesting stuff and replaced it with aliens doing their own alien god disaster that we see every other gen on Earth anyways.

Eh. Oh well. What's done is done. I would have just preferred otherwise.

@Clod Ah yes I can’t wait the Pokémon episode going straight into PARENT ABUSE.

This is a kids series. What you are asking for is to dark for kids. If the series was for teenagers I would agree with you.

@Dafirelive Yes. The kid series with the direct implication in gen 4 that people mate with their Pokemon, where we get a whole city murdered off in gen 5 and is wholly based around the economy of dog fighting rings.

I'm not asking them to direct a freaking Elfen Lied episode of Pokemon. I'm just asking them when they present the idea themselves and tease further story to be had there, to commit to the story branch they presented. Nor am I asking them to visually directly depict Guzma getting his teeth kicked in by his dad. But getting kids media to lightly approach the topic of discussion at all in a manner they can digest is not a negative. It's Disney. It's Pixar. It's Steven Universe.

Which I'm sure some smart guy reading already has a snide remark on those being in fact negatives but shush you.

Ya and game freak only said people got married to Pokémon in the Japanese version, what city got destroyed in gen5 the closest just got covered with ice not destroyed, and if you ever payed attention to the world of Pokémon there are rules set in place for “dogfights”. You fight the villains of Pokémon so that there are no actual dogfights. Some Pokédex entries say it’s important to let some Pokémon fight like tyranatar. If it does not fight it acts like a dog that has not been on a walk. It destroys stuff.

If it was any other company then it would be easy to quit with Ash. They could have the new series where he's slightly older, and have him retire at the end. But this is one of the largest media companies in the world. And they pump out their series the same every time for the new kids to watch. They can't quit because theres still money in Ash.