I haven’t really watched the Pokémon anime in… I don’t even know. Years. I stopped paying attention about midway through the Johto series, largely because the timeslots just weren’t convenient for me anymore. However, I’ve just recently begun watching it again on the official website, which has about ten episodes available at a time from each of Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, Sinnoh and (as of last week) Unova, and rotates them at a rate of five episodes each week. A couple of months ago, the Kanto series rotated back to Pokémon, I Choose You, (a.k.a. episode one) and I started watching from the beginning. I have been taking notes. No, seriously. They’re in my desk drawer. I’ll give a synopsis of each episode so everyone knows what’s going on, but you can find one of those anywhere on the internet; what I really want to write about is what they tell us about the world of Pokémon (particularly stuff that we don’t learn from the games or that seems to contradict the games), why I think that’s interesting and, perhaps in some cases, what the games might be able to take from the anime.
I’m not going to devote an entry to each individual episode because I just don’t think I’d have that much to say about them (except for a couple of really important ones). More likely, I’ll do them two or three at a time, according to whatever seems to make sense – I’m anticipating that some groups of episodes will just ‘go’ together. Also, I’m not going to try to take on the whole fifteen-year run of the anime in one go, since that would a) get boring and b) probably kill me. My current plan is to do everything up to episode 32 (when Ash earns his Soul Badge), which should take six or seven weeks, then do another project (on the suggestion of a reader, I’ll be reviewing all of the starter Pokémon), which should take about five weeks, then cover the anime up to episode 63 (when Ash earns his Earth Badge – he kind of takes a holiday of about 25 episodes between his Fuchsia and Cinnabar Gym battles and I don’t even know where he is for most of that time… possibly Belgium). After that… whatever takes my fancy, I guess!
Pokémaniacal 