In Ryme City, humans live alongside adorable creatures with special powers called Pokémon. Tim (Justice Smith is perfect as the reluctant hero with a smile like the sun) travels there and teams up with ambitious newsroom intern Lucy (Blockers’ Kathryn Newton) and an amnesiac, hard-boiled Pokémon detective Pikachu (voiced by a gruff, caffeinated Ryan Reynolds) to investigate the whereabouts of his disappeared father, a Ryme City cop.
Although I was born in the 1990s, the Pokémon phenomenon, founded in 1995, mostly passed me by. I remember the Jigglypuff’s hypnotic blue eyes and the TV show’s theme song (“Gotta catch ’em all!”) but I have no particular fond memories and certainly no great knowledge of the video games, trading cards or the animated series. What’s clever is the way this live-action spinoff exploits nostalgia for the family-friendly blockbusters of the late 1980s and the 1990s (a broader entry point) rather than the Japanese “Pocket Monsters” themselves. The CGI critters are seamlessly integrated with the 35mm cinematography, the film stock’s grain smoothing the visual tackiness. Both the fusing of animation and live action and the use of noir tropes recall Robert Zemeckis’s 1988 Who Framed Roger Rabbit, while the score’s keyboard synths invoke the 8-bit handheld consoles on which Pokémon would have first been played.
