I Did Not Ask for This Pikachu, and Yet Here We Are
My first-gen Pokémon team was perfect, and I’ll die on this hill: Mew and Mewtwo, obviously—you don’t build a serious lineup without them. Charizard, raised from a Charmander with the patience of someone who actually shows up. Articuno for the ice storms. Gyarados because deep down, a Magikarp still lived inside it somewhere, and that matters. And Dragonite instead of Eevee or Pikachu—not because I didn’t love them, but because when it’s life and death and honor on the line, you don’t march into battle with an Eevee. No matter how much you love it.
So when Detective Pikachu was announced—a noir mystery with a CGI Pikachu voiced by Ryan Reynolds helping a kid find his missing father in a city where Pokémon and humans coexist like neighbors who’ve learned to tolerate each other—my reaction was: why would I want this? The original anime existed. Ash’s perpetual losing streak, Misty’s short fuse, Brock’s doomed crush on every woman he encountered—all of that was still right there.
Then the trailer came out. And I have to admit: the thing didn’t look wrong. The world they’d built was genuinely strange in a way that earns attention—Pokémon in rain-slicked alleyways, folded into city infrastructure with the resigned logic of a commute. Justice Smith, looking for his father, carries enough confused sincerity that you believe his crisis. And Pikachu, rendered in unsettling photorealistic fur with Reynolds’ voice coming out of its small face, was somehow… likable. That shouldn’t work. It did.
The film draws from the Nintendo 3DS spinoff of the same name, which was always a strange detour from the main series—a detective game instead of a battle game, a mystery instead of a journey. Maybe that’s why it translated to film more naturally than a straight adaptation would. It already knew what it was.
I ended up seeing it. But if my team—Mew, Mewtwo, Charizard, Articuno, Gyarados, Dragonite—doesn’t appear somewhere as the greatest first-gen lineup ever assembled, that’s a point against it I’m not taking back.