I absolutely love Pokémon. It’s one of the series that I fell in love with as a kid and, honestly, is probably part of the reason why I like anime so much as an adult. I don’t think I even realized it was anime as a kid, but that’s beside the point.
Now, like many IPs, Pokémon has gone in a slightly different direction with its current animation. While it does still have the regular anime-style show (which I don’t think will ever not be a part of Pokémon), they have recently stepped into the world of stop-motion, a style of animation I love so much.
The latest trailer for a new teaser, titled Pokémon Tales: The Misadventures of Sirfetch’d and Pichu, has just come out. You can check it out below:
Some fans were surprised that this was going to be on Disney+ rather than Netflix, where the previous stop-motion animation project, Pokémon Concierge, had been. However, I’m here to tell you why this totally makes sense.
Pokémon has always gone from network to network
I think the biggest thing is that the Pokémon brand itself has never been just a one-stop shop for a channel like a lot of other TV shows and brands have been. Like, for example, you’d never see Stranger Things just randomly over on Prime Video, and vice versa with other Prime Video shows on Netflix. Certain brands don’t travel well, and, obviously, contracts and licensing agreements also prevent that.
When it comes to a brand as big as Pokemon, it makes sense why certain styles move from one streaming service to the next, because contracts change constantly. The anime series wasn’t even originally made in America. It’s purely a Japanese company. We only get distribution rights to some of the anime series through Netflix.
The same goes for any other kind of animation. Studios have these contracts with certain streaming companies. For something like this, where they are partnering with Aardman Animations, a huge company that is known for making family-friendly stop-motion animation, it makes total sense.
No offense, but Netflix tends to ruin things
Truthfully, this is the biggest reason why this is good. And that’s because Netflix tends to ruin anime and animated projects they touch.
I don’t really mean that in an entirely negative way. I think that some great Netflix originals have truly stood the test of time and are phenomenal shows. But often, when a series is really popular, it does tend to drop in quality over time.A great example would be Wednesday, or even Stranger Things. I still don’t agree with the Stranger Things ending now, nearly nine months later.
In terms of IPs, Netflix tends to take a lot of existing IPs and sort of mess them up. A good example is the Avatar franchise. I mean, the creators of ATLA literally left the live-action adaptation because they didn’t agree with where the story was going. Now, season 2 of Avatar: The Last Airbender dropped, and it wasn’t nearly as popular and had a lot of issues.
While there’s no designated lore around Pokémon aside from their powers and the little snippets we get about them from a Pokédex, I still truly believe that if Netflix somehow got its hands on this, it wouldn’t really be a great feature. I think a lot of problems would arise, and the animation would end up choppy. Pokémon Concierge was fun, but I don't believe they'd strike lightning twice.
Pokémon feels more kid-friendly than anything else, which is perfect for Disney+
That being said, I’m not saying Disney+ is the end-all, be-all. Honestly, for a while, Disney+ felt like it was created for Star Wars content and the new Marvel TV shows. There wasn’t really a lot of original content going on.
Things have slowly changed over the years, and while there’s still a lot of growing to do, I do like a lot of the content on that platform. They’ve done a decent enough job adapting the Percy Jackson and the Olympians novels, which is a hard thing to do with how beloved that franchise is, and the anticipated season 3 is on the way. So for Pokémon, I think it would be a good fit.
And while Pokémon has a lot of adult themes in many ways (especially in some of the older seasons of the anime and the older movies), it’s still primarily a kids' program. I think having Disney take over something like this, at least for this specific project, will be good in the long run; whether I will believe that when it premieres in 2027, I don’t know. But we’ll wait and see.
It might be time to check out some old Pokémon episodes to prepare. Time to head to good old YouTube.
Add us as a preferred source on Google