Pokémon Heroes

At 70 minutes (as timed at a press screening), POKÉMON HEROES is the shortest Pokémon movie yet. This may be a relief to parents and Pokémon-haters everywhere, but it leaves Pokémon's target audience hungering for more. The big action climax never quite delivers and the great triumphal note the earlier films ended on never quite comes. This is especially disappointing because the film's first half offered a most exciting build-up involving two spectacular new Water Pokémon and two clever and attractive new villains. Thanks to these elements, the film is still worth seeing but you may want to wait until the DVD release, when it will be accompanied by the Pikachu short that played with it when it ran in Japanese theaters last summer.

The film does at least make its new Pokémon characters, Latios and Latias, a little more powerful and more layered than most Pokémon get the chance to be. Shaped somewhat like dinosaurs and able to both fly at high speeds and swim underwater, they're colorful, graceful creatures, a brother-and-sister team who are thoroughly devoted to each other. Aside from Ash's faithful Pikachu, they get the most screen time of any Pokémon in the film.

Annie and Oakley are the new bad girls in town and they completely blow their colleagues, Team Rocket, out of the water (well, actually, INTO the water--a running gag throughout the film). They're fashionable, if somewhat snobby, teen villainesses with eye-catching outfits and hairdos who get ample opportunity to wrap the audience (at least the older male part) around their little fingers before their ill-fated (and somewhat rushed) attempt to take over Alto Mare, an island city that hosts the annual Water Pokémon Festival (the draw for our heroes, Ash, Misty and Brock). As master thieves, Annie and Oakley seem to be a lot more efficient than Team Rocket and should be given more to do in future Pokémon entries.

The design of Alto Mare deserves note for being the most extensively detailed urban setting yet seen in the entire Pokémon series. Largely created by CGI, and modeled after Venice, Italy, it's quite visually stunning and deserves greater attention from anime fans than it's likely to get.

The big mystery surrounding this film (and the previous one, POKÉMON 4EVER) is why Miramax has chosen to distribute it in theaters without the 23-minute Pikachu short that normally accompanies each Pokémon movie (and did so for the first three Pokémon movies when they were released by Warner Bros.). Certainly, given the short running time of this one, the addition of the delightful "Pika Pika Starlight Camp" (as it was called in Japan) would have gone a long way to giving fans their money's worth.