Before you get too hyped there don’t appear to be any actual pokemon in this world:
The series will tell the story of Madoka Akagi, a young girl who moves to Tokyo and becomes enthralled with the world of Pokémon when her mother gifts her a Game Boy and a copy of Pokémon Red.
Feels like another entry in the “full length, live action commercials” series. Joining Tetris, BlackBerry, Barbie, Jobs, GI Joe, Social Network, Transformers, and even Star Wars since licensing and derivative products make more money than their actual tv and movie content.
I really dislike this trend, even if some of the movies are sometimes good. Feels icky and insincere.
To be fair, Tetris had a really interesting story, and was about the real-life licensing issues that arose as a result. That said, the film’s storytelling pales in comparison to the more accurate gaming historian video on the same stuff.
Barbie also had a grounded, introspective view of its product, and was actually quite critical of Barbie. Though this one ends up being more effective as a commercial, it also had a lot of good social commentary on our society, and on the impacts of the ideals of sexism on both men and women alike.
The rest were definitely just sucking off their respective brands though.
Pokemon and most anime in general, or anything else targeted at children, always was and will be a commercial. That’s not even necessarily a bad thing, since a lot of them aim at being good enough that people want merch.
I don’t disagree on anime/children’s content or even Star Wars to an extent but since this is a Pokémon show with no actual Pokémon I think it falls under the corporate commercial category more than anything else.
I think it’s an interesting and meta take to show a human, in the human world, becoming engrossed in the fictional world of Pokémon. I think many Pokémon gamers will be able to empathise well with her, having lived through the revelation of Pokémon on Game Boy and the amazing culture around it.
BlackBerry was a commercial? For a dead company?
BlackBerry still exists and is a pretty big publicly traded company, they just don’t do phones anymore.
Does BlackBerry exist or does RIM?
I agree with what you’re saying but the BB example doesn’t fit for me.
That’s fine, still feels icky to me personally to watch movies glorifying real life corporations. Not really my idea of entertainment.
Check out BlackBerry.com, that brand name recognition definitely isn’t going to waste. They just serve the enterprise sector now.
Makes sense. Even back in its hardware heyday, BlackBerry leaned on its strong security reputation to mainly market itself to business/enterprise users and was the only hardware trusted by high security sectors of the US government.
Research in Motion (RIM) was renamed to BlackBerry Limited in 2013.
Go figure. I stand to be corrected.
Exactly my thoughts. Barbie was the first thing that came to my mind. Just using the brand recognition. Why not go all out and try to pull a Mario Movie?
No Pokémon: then why mention Pokémon then.
Here’s a direct link to the trailer since that website had a full size pop up that wouldn’t close for me on mobile.
That wasn’t what I expected but it looks like it could be a novel show
