Pokémon: I Choose You – Pokémon Emergency
Today I begin my journey through the Pokémon anime, scheduled to last… until I get bored, though I’ll be taking breaks periodically to keep doing stuff related to the games too. Well, there’s no sense wasting time; here we go!
The first episode, Pokémon: I Choose You, introduces us to our hero – and I use the term loosely – Ash Ketchum of Pallet Town. Ash is, of course, in all the movies, including the ones I’ve been reviewing recently, but before now I haven’t wanted to spend a lot of time describing his character, so let’s do that now. He’s ten years old (supposedly, he is exactly ten years, ten months and ten days old when he begins his journey – which would mean that he actually turns eleven at some point between now and episode nine, and never mentions it) and absolutely fanatical about Pokémon and Pokémon training, but, as soon becomes clear, knows next to nothing about either. If you’ve seen anything of the anime at all, you’ll know Ash can be a little slow at times, to put it mildly, though he does gradually get better, and is also unflinchingly honest, forthright and idealistic (to the point of being rather “Lawful Stupid” initially, but he seems to get over this fairly quickly). His general ignorance, while somewhat odd given his lifelong ambition to become a Pokémon Master, is a necessary conceit to ease in viewers who are unfamiliar with the franchise; when your viewers need things explained to them, it helps if one of your characters does too. Ash’s other most important trait is probably his pride. He is absolutely convinced that he is an immeasurably talented Pokémon trainer and bound – nay, destined – to one day become the very best, like no-one ever was. He hates to lose and has a bad habit of inventing excuses for his defeats, or even accusing his opponents of foul play. This, ladies and gentlemen, is our protagonist.
Ash oversleeps on the day he is supposed to start his journey and winds up desperately racing down the road in his pyjamas to make his appointment to receive his first Pokémon from Professor Oak. Outside Oak’s lab, Ash runs into his rival, the Professor’s grandson Gary Oak, who is, astonishingly, as much of a douche as his in-game counterpart Blue, and just about the only character in the series more arrogant than Ash. The interesting thing about Ash’s encounter with Gary is that (in contrast to Red and Blue, who were supposedly rivals from infancy) this seems to be the first time they’ve ever met. Putting aside the obvious questions of how they could possibly have avoided each other in a relatively small town like Pallet, this actually explains quite neatly how the two manage to get off on the wrong foot so badly: Gary’s first impression of Ash is of a kid who wants to be a Pokémon trainer sleeping in on his first day and turning up to receive his first Pokémon still in his pyjamas. Put yourself in his shoes.
Professor Oak only had three Pokémon for the four trainers leaving that day – one Bulbasaur, one Charmander, one Squirtle – which he handed out on a first-come, first-serve basis. Ash, the last to arrive, missed out. Confronted with Ash’s plaintive face, Oak reluctantly gives him a fourth Pokémon: Pikachu. Pikachu are notoriously difficult for new trainers to handle, in contrast to the three standard starters, who seem to be the standards because they’re comparatively easy to deal with. Why Oak had Pikachu in the first place is never explained; nor is why he didn’t have enough Pokémon for the trainers he knew were coming. I suspect he originally intended to offer Pikachu to Gary, believing his grandson would be talented enough to handle him, but was stymied when Gary chose one of the three traditional starters, and was forced to hand over Pikachu to the unfortunate kid who arrived late. Pikachu, as anticipated, takes an instant dislike to Ash, electrocuting him repeatedly and refusing to return to his Pokéball, forcing Ash to physically drag him out of Pallet Town, where they get acquainted with the aggressive fauna of the Pokémon world and learn that Pikachu isn’t the only Pokémon who hates Ash; in fact, they all do. Ash manages to incur the wrath of an entire flock of Spearow, who severely injure Pikachu as they pursue the hapless duo. Ash scoops his Pokémon up, jumps into a river to escape, and is soon fished up by Misty, a red-haired Water Pokémon specialist who will shortly become his ABSOLUTELY NOT GIRLFRIEND. Ash promptly steals her bike to escape the Spearow, and runs it straight into a ditch. As a storm brews overhead Ash puts himself between Pikachu and the flock, defiantly proclaiming his destiny to become a Pokémon Master. I couldn’t say how much of this he actually believes, since he must be entertaining the possibility that he is about to die and is probably just trying to go out with some semblance of credibility by protecting his Pokémon. However, Ash’s bravado inspires Pikachu to take action, and he channels a lightning bolt from the storm clouds above them to blast the entire flock into submission.
When Ash wakes up some hours later, Pikachu is half dead, and Ash carries him the rest of the way to the Pokémon Centre in Viridian City, where Nurse Joy #512 manages to patch him up. While Ash waits for Pikachu to recover, he speaks to his mother and Professor Oak on the phone and confesses that maybe this whole Pokémon training thing isn’t quite going the way he planned. Misty catches up to him, carrying the battered and charred remains of her bike, and furiously demands repayment, but softens visibly when she sees his obvious concern for Pikachu. As all this is happening, the Pokémon Centre is attacked without warning by everyone’s favourite comic relief villains, Jessie and James of Team Rocket, and their talking Pokémon companion Meowth, who mean to steal all the injured Pokémon at the centre. They’re a great deal less bumbling and more intimidating than they become in later episodes, particularly as Misty is the only person in the building who is in any condition to fight back. Their Ekans and Koffing lay waste to the building as Joy frantically tries to teleport as many Pokéballs as she can to the Pokémon Centre in nearby Pewter City and Misty fails to do anything useful since she’s forgotten that her Goldeen can only fight underwater. Luckily, the group of Pikachu who run the centre’s backup power supply step in to recharge Ash’s Pikachu, who fries the thieves with his Thundershock and forces them to flee, completely destroying the Pokémon Centre in the process and likely costing Viridian City several million dollars in repairs. Everyone is totally fine with this.
So, what do these first two episodes teach us (aside from the fact that the officials of the Pokémon world are remarkably permissive about massive property damage)?
I want to talk about the idea of a Pokémon journey, since this seems like an appropriate moment and it’s easily one of the most bizarre things about this setting: many parents in the Pokémon world seem to have no problem at all with letting their children leave school and wander off into the wilderness accompanied only by a magic lizard. Episode one demonstrates, unquestionably, that this can be dangerous – Ash’s circumstances are unusual, since most trainers don’t have so much trouble with their starter Pokémon, but the events that led to him and Pikachu nearly being killed by a horde of rabid starlings could have happened to anyone. Professor Oak, interestingly, refers to Ash and the other three trainers who leave Pallet Town that day as “the newest class of Pokémon students,” which seems to imply that the whole dreadful business is regarded as part of their education in some roundabout manner. When you think about it, given that the inhabitants of this world use Pokémon for just about everything, Pokémon trainer is probably a fairly solid career choice (I doubt Ash is thinking in those terms, but his mother, and the parents of other young trainers, could conceivably be). The fact that Ash seems to have daddy issues is probably important for him specifically as well; we never meet Ash’s father and references to him are rare, but we know from Ash’s phone conversation with his mother that dad was a Pokémon trainer too, and Ash implies that he never thought much of his only son. Ash’s own ambitions are almost certainly related, and his mother’s willingness to let him follow them probably ties into it as well. I quietly suspect that, although Pokémon-users are ubiquitous, full-time Pokémon trainers normally come from families with a history of working closely with Pokémon (though not always; if memory serves Casey, from the Johto series, was the first person in her family to become a trainer). Four trainers leave Pallet Town in episode one, and although never meet the other two, both Ash and Gary come from such families. In short, I think that many or most people in the Pokémon world probably find the idea of a Pokémon journey as odd as we do, but accept that it’s just the way some families do things.
The other thing that deserves a mention about episode one is a comment made by Ash’s Pokédex when the first Spearow attacks Pikachu: “wild Pokémon are often jealous of human-trained Pokémon,” because this is a hugely important point for the relationship between Pokémon and humans. We’ll probably talk about this in a lot more depth later, but for now I think it’s important to take note of this quote. The franchise normally portrays the discipline of Pokémon training as being beneficial to Pokémon, and in that context jealousy makes sense, but wild Pokémon obviously don’t want to be captured by trainers under normal circumstances, which confuses things. On interpretation is that some species of wild Pokémon (particularly aggressive, temperamental species like Spearow) think that trained Pokémon have an easy life and resent them for being lap dogs, so to speak. Another, which I think I like more, is that wild Pokémon fight back because they want to be owned by trainers they can respect, and are jealous of Pokémon who have found such trainers, but in Ash’s particular case that doesn’t really fit since the entire world seems to agree in the first episode that Ash is an absolutely terrible trainer. Again, this stuff is going to recur often, so keep it in mind.
This, then, is the world in which we find ourselves: ten-year-olds running around with magical creatures as bodyguards, fighting crime and blowing up public buildings. Yep. That’s Japan, all right. Next time, I’ll be covering the Viridian Forest episodes, in which Ash captures and rapidly evolves a Caterpie.
Pokémaniacal 