Pokémon Detective Pikachu (Letterman, 2019) is streaming on Netflix
It’s the 26th birthday for Netflix today so it feels churlish not to give them this slot.
I also haven’t done a family film for a while so, after considerable rummaging around the “Kids & Family” section of the Netflix AU/NZ website I came across this title that I had surprisingly warm memories of.
One one level Pokémon Detective Pikachu is just corporate exploitation of pre-existing IP to promote unsustainable consumption and Nintendo more dominance of the ‘attention economy’.
But on another, it was a fun reward for fans who are among the least tribal that I know.
Ryan Reynolds is the voice of the furry little guy with the deerstalker hat – a spinoff from a specific recent Pokémon game – and he teams up with a teenage boy (Justice Smith) to solve crimes:
In the film, Pokémon are wild creatures that need to be captured and “trained” by humans in order to compete against each other (like horse racing or, if you have a darker perspective, bear baiting). There is one place where humans and Pokémon live in harmony, where relationships between the species is more like the partnership between people and their daemons in His Dark Materials, and where Pokémon fighting is illegal. Ryme City has an interesting look – London landmarks covered in Japanese-style iconography surrounding a Hong Kong-like bay.
I reviewed this at the time for RNZ Widescreen and thought that it was much more successful than it had any right to be.
I’ve talked about how the amiable presence of Reynolds helps make the film entertaining but I should also add that director Rob Letterman and cinematographer John Mathieson (and all their collaborators) have gone out of their way to make the film feel like a film. They’ve shot the picture on old fashioned Kodak celluloid – and you can tell – and as much of the film as possible has been shot practically in real locations rather than in front of giant green screens.
It’s a lesson that many of these fantasy films could do with learning – that the more fantastical the story you want to tell, the more grounded and believable what you are seeing needs to be. Fans already think these little monsters are as good as real. It’s a sign of good faith that they can watch the film and nothing – or nothing much – can challenge that faith.
The film also has Bill Nighy as villain so +1 for that, too.
Today I also discovered that Netflix – like all of the other streamers that are part of the AMPTP producers’ organisation I suppose – release certain films into cinemas for just long enough to be eligible for Academy Award consideration but not so long that they become theatrical releases for the purposes of their contracts with talent, thus avoiding paying proper theatrical scale residuals.
This strike is revealing a great deal about how the modern studio system exploits the creators who they rely on for their content and I don’t want my featuring of that content here to imply any endorsement of their methods.
It’s an awful situation but the stakes are high and if writers and actors lose this battle then audiences will lose too.
